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Sure, but we're talking about historical oppressors and colonisers here. I would completely understand an English person feeling uncomfortable if they walked into an Irish bar in 2024 and the band started singing "Come Out ye Black and Tans". And I say that as an Irish person who's lived in Ireland his whole life and retains a certain residual sympathy for the Irish republican cause.

I do not concede that my "excuses" are "easy". We've had a decade of widespread attacks on freedom of speech, including popular public repudiation of the concept's core validity. The principles free speech proponents claim, and which many of us wholeheartedly accepted and acted upon in good faith for decades, were swept aside in an instant when they obstructed Progressive ideology. That action requires a response.

Free speech was supposed to be for all of us. It observably failed in that mission. If you are willing to accept one side censoring its opponents without being censored in turn, I am more than willing to operate under those rules provided I get to be the censor you favor. If you want to argue that we should cooperate to secure free speech for everyone, I note that I am part of "everyone", and eagerly await the lifting of the censorship against myself and my allies. If you want to help the people censoring me to not be censored in turn, with no actual plan for ending their own censorship, I am going to oppose you, because this is a conflict and you appear to have picked a side.

This combined with an easy excuse to find the outgroup dishonorable allows you quite a convenient relationship with when you are bound by honor.

I don't think that's a particularly important goal. No matter what you do, social media friends will very rarely be "real" friends. Real friends will hang out with you to get drinks, will help you move a couch, will send you job opportunities that are a perfect fit for you they heard about from another of their friends. We should absolutely try to do something to rebuild communities and make people more social again, but doing it through social media isn't a worthwhile goal.

I agree that having friends who will physically meet you and do things for you in real life is very important, and very different from people who just talk to me online. I don't know how to fix that, though. I know there's Nextdoor that's supposed to be for that, but I've never found it useful for anything except buying/selling stuff. I feel like, for better or worse, we're stuck with social media so we've gotta work forward through that.

Basically I think that social media does the opposite of what it's supposed to do. Instead of being social, it's anti-social. Instead of drawing us together by helping us connect, it forces us into either bitter arguments or monotonous echo chambers. Instead of getting regular people to post their own stuff ("you" tube), it encourages us to watch the viral videos from others. It's essentially just television now, but with no commercial breaks and an algorithm to make it more addictive. It makes us passive, alienated, and dissatisfied. We abandon our real social connections, feel lonely, and try to fix the loneliness through a parasocial pseudo-relationship with these influencers on social media who we can't interact with in any meaningful way.

One option might be to go even harder and have a social network where there's a hard limit on the number of people you can connect with. Myspace used to sort of do this with their "top ten friends" list back in the day. It could also require the relationship be two-way, so that I can't follow a celebrity unless they also follow me back. I'm just sick of our culture being more and more driven by celebrity worship.

Honor cannot be dispensed with, and treating the dishonorable as honorable is not itself honorable.

Other than quantum mechanical shenanigans this seems like a settled fact of existence?

On one hand, yeah, fair. On the other hand, I guessed before I clicked that it was a gravel event doing this.

The question is over what kinds of people we are going to make in the future, not over who to cull now. I don't think all beings have an equal right to life.

Zero - I fuck all the women, literally all of them, all 3.5 billion of them.

I'm not sure I have an effortpost in me about this, but I'll give it some thought.

In theory, science should be able to prove anything that works, with sufficient resources and time. So it's the case that if it works, it is science that hasn't been proven yet.

I'd disagree, science is fundamentally a process for discovering true facts. You can discover true facts via other processes, but that's not science.

Nothing is going to be 100%, but the attempt to gather knowledge is so much more advanced. The average bro is so much more educated, and conceives knowledge as so much more important, today than in 2004. That trend is important.

It's true, but how much more do we know about e.g. tongkat ali today than 20 years ago? Probably 20 years ago no Westerner had even heard of it, but all we have now is a small handful of low quality studies. The attempt to gather knowledge is more advanced but at the same time there is so much more to gather knowledge about, and there are so many things on the fringes that we know practically nothing about.

What's the moral/ethical issue with optimizing for getting laid? Other than straight up lying, I can't think of anything, but lying is bad in any context.

outside of a few truly principled libertarian types

I tire of this parenthetical being deployed to avoid grappling with legitimate calls to defend liberty. Yes, it's clearly not the prime value for some of the bigger ideological movements today. But it's deployed because it still carries weight and its call should be answered regardless of what slime blows the horn.

I think it's this one:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/

Also the origin of the "fifty Stalins" line!

I'd love to hear an AAQC post from you on the topic. In theory, science should be able to prove anything that works, with sufficient resources and time. So it's the case that if it works, it is science that hasn't been proven yet. Which I think is where the confusion sets in.

I suppose there is some subset of people who are automatically fooled by Dr. BroScience having Dr. in front of his name, but Hubes generally does a pretty good job of going over his material and what is scientifically proven, the state of the studies. Is he perfect? Probably not.

But with everything in the Rogan-Verse, I'm reminded how profoundly stupid the advice a man got in 2004 or so happened to be. Nothing is going to be 100%, but the attempt to gather knowledge is so much more advanced. The average bro is so much more educated, and conceives knowledge as so much more important, today than in 2004. That trend is important.

It's neither the case that "Torture regimes never fail" nor that "Torture never accomplishes anything for the torturer". It's a question of "to what extent", and "in which circumstances?".

I am pretty confident that people can't do much better with a torture regime than we've seen them do in the past. That is to say, I think the problem is pretty well bounded by irreducible limits on human agency and capacity, and I do not expect this to change in the forseeable future. Notably, if Determinism could be proven, if we really could engineer practical mind control and mind-reading, this would no longer be the case, and much worse torture regimes would seem a very likely outcome.

The difficulty of "engineering people" doesn't require determinism to be false, just that we have imperfect knowledge of what the determinants are.

Suppose I claim to be able to predict the outcome of coin flips. You have me call a hundred coin flips. If I get 90 right, it's reasonable to say I'm on to something, even if I don't have all the kinks ironed out. If I get 56 right, the reasonable conclusion is that I got lucky. If Determinism could get 90 out of a hundred, or 75, or even 60, I think that would be reasonable evidence that it was correct. My read of the historical evidence is that the outcomes of attempts to engineer from Determinism have no correlation with the goals of the engineering.

I'm not asking for 100% results. I'm asking for any results that are clearly distinguishable from non-Determinist explanations.

We don't have to posit that a human mind is fundamentally non-deterministic in order to recognize that perfect determination is going to be an infeasible practical problem -- hence the "humans need to be treated like people" abstraction.

It is important, I think, to recognize that this is Determinism Of The Gaps. Previous iterations of Determinism did not believe that perfect determination was practically infeasible, were pretty clear that humans did not need to be treated like humans, and in fact believed that they had all the tools at hand to arbitrarily shape humanity however they wished. Their beliefs were high-status, received very significant social, political, and financial backing, and still failed utterly by their own stated standards. Hubris is a human constant, but it does not appear to me that most Determinists recognize the previous falsifications and the subsequent general retreat into unfalsifiability, which I think is a serious red flag for the theory in general from an empirical perspective, and also a telling error in one's understanding of history, of where we are and how we got here.

Things get a lot more feasible. Now we don't have to contain a 100% faithful and ever changing model of the person we're attempting to "control" -- or perhaps more fittingly "manipulate". We just need to create a situation where we can reduce the entropy enough that we can get the results we're looking for before the entropy compounds and bursts through the seams.

Manipulation and deceit aren't novel, though, and no one is confused over whether they exist. And in fact, we generally expect people to resist and avoid such attacks, and consider them at least partially responsible if they fail to do so.

Provided that the "subject" agrees to hypnosis and isn't creeped out and on guard, hypnotists can take advantage of a fairly low entropy set of possible responses to engineer ways to get people into states where their guards are predictably lowered even further, and then do stuff that bypasses the persons conscious will completely.

I don't know much about hypnosis, so this is both interesting and directly applicable to the issue at hand. My rough understanding is that hypnosis is easily resisted, and that you can't get the subject to do anything they actually don't want to do. Is this incorrect?

The stuff that's possible with hypnosis is legit scary.

I'm prepared to believe it. Where's the proof? Offhand, I can think of several obvious real-world applications for a workable method to alter someone's mind in a controllable fashion, just off the top of my head:

  • Treating addiction seems stupidly obvious. Does hypnosis reliably nullify addictions to alcohol, tobacco or narcotics? Does it improve weight-loss outcomes?
  • Is hypnosis a reliable tool for criminal interrogation? How about for depositions and so forth in civil lawsuits? In a lawsuit with conflicting claims, why not simply require the parties to undergo hypnosis so that any inconvenient facts they're hiding can be teased out?
  • Marriage counseling seems like an obvious use-case. When you have people who want to get along but are having conflict, why not just smooth all that out with a little touch-up? I'd imagine people would volunteer for this happily if it could be demonstrated to work. This would be an example where you would even expect the subjects to be enthusiastically cooperative.
  • Any sort of trusted position, from judge to police officer to accountant to banker to CEO, seems like it would be a good candidate for either will-compromising verification of good conduct, or for induced commitment to good conduct.
  • Education: improve study habits? Suppress disruptive behavior? Get kids to get along with each other?

...The short version is that if the obvious implications of what you're saying were true, I'd expect the world to look very different from how it does. For a start, I'd expect hypnotists to be as highly-paid and multitudinous as tech workers. They don't seem to be, though. Why? Hypnosis has been studied and practiced for at least a century, likely much longer. Where's the hard takeoff in society-restructuring capability?

When you ask rhetorically "Can you make a Christian atheist?", my answer is "Provided they volunteer for hypnosis, yes, actually".

Most interesting. Could you describe this process in more detail? Why does it wear off? What do you think the wear-off implies? Did they know you were going to try to do it?

...but I'd also challenge your presupposition that "engineering" requires one to work around rather than with people's will.

Again, how do we distinguish "cooperative engineering" from just regular willful "cooperation"? People can choose to submit, to follow orders, to obey, if they want to. The Determinist argument was that you could force them to obey, and even force them to want to.

If you show me a better way to get to work, I'll take it because it gets me what I want.

Will you? Why do you suppose teaching in an inner-city school sucks so hard? Aren't the teachers trying to offer the students better ways to work?

But also deterministic -- and determined by what gets me what I want. If you plug your fence into the electrical outlet, I won't touch it twice.

You might touch it twice to prove how tough you are to your friends. You might sue me for not posting proper signage, or go off in deep contemplation about how things aren't as they appear. You might fly into a rage or burst into tears. You might go and by insulated wirecutters and cut the fence to bits. you might piss on it to see what happens. You might get angry and cuss me out. You might burn my house down.

You probably won't touch it twice. People do indeed respond to incentives. They don't respond predictably, or controllably.

I have not claimed that people can't modify other people's behavior. My argument is that such modification of others is an art, and very much not a science. It is not predictable, controllable or repeatable in any but the very loosest senses of these words, and it does not generalize across all humans well at all. My evidence is, again, any facet of human interaction you'd care to look at. Education, law enforcement, romantic relationships, interpersonal conflict, employer/employee relationships, politics, any form of human organization... all of these would operate in a vastly different way if modification of others were a science. They don't, which is very good evidence that it isn't.

Further, I do not think that this evident state of affairs is going to change within the foreseeable future.

I think that's a fine approach, what gets my goat is the people who conflate that with science. Let a thousand tongkat alis bloom, but it's laughable to pretend that there's scientific backing or that these studies should be taken seriously. The venn diagram of "works" and "science based" is not a circle.

Seems to me the Kitos War, a rebellion against the occupying Romans, counts as that too.

I'm always torn on weightlifting and sports science studies. There are just so few really quality scientific studies done for weightlifting that even involves people at my pathetic level of skill. I'd love to only do what is scientifically guaranteed to work, but that just doesn't exist. Even the most basic bromides turn out to be based on pretty bad studies. I'm willing to be engage with anecdotal bro-science from people around me who are stronger than me, and guess-and-check to find what works.

No, chain of cause and effect doesn't stop at the neck, 45% of your fellow citizens becoming obese in a century can't be explained by their bad moral character.

Nonsense. Widespread availability of pornography may make it considerably more difficult to not become a degenerate coomer than it was a century ago, but it is still a choice to consume pornography or not. I'm more sympathetic to modern coomers than I would be to ones 100 years ago because it's much easier to access and fall into, but it still doesn't change the fact that it is physically possible to go without masturbating, or at least to not consume all kinds of degenerate porn to do so, and ultimately it is a choice to do so or not.

The same applies to obesity, there may be all sorts of factors like more easily available food, more fattening food, and even genetic disposition to pig out or to retain fat. But it's still ultimately a choice to consume too many calories.

Sergey kind of has it although my impression is it’s with poly people. Eric Schmidt kind of has it, but only by leading on women about having a kid with him apparently. In general the status loss for a high status woman being a concubine is so significant it doesn’t happen often. To some extent if your definition of ‘high tier’ is young fashion models, Adnan Khashoggi had it in his prime, and he was a billionaire in the 70s and 80s when that was very, very rare indeed.

Cycling is seethingly, maddeningly blue-coded, to the point where major events provide "scholarships" to anyone who's not a white male and demand the latter pay more than asked.

Agreed. Sounds like we've settled on: a man of Huberman's status can't organize a harem for himself and have it consist of high-tier women. If you're of Huberman's grade, you have women eager to date you but you need to mislead them about your relationship status if you want your harem.

So... how much more status do you need to actually pull this off? Can Sergey Brin get away with it?

Ah, there it is again. I was trying to remember where my triple-axis political compass went but couldn't find it.

Anyway, I think there's a better labelling Nate doesn't just come out and say for some reason: "socialism" is "progressivism", "conservatism" is "traditionalism", and liberalism is [classical] liberalism. The top of the triangle (where the traditionalist/progressives are) is best characterized by master morality/conflict theory whereas the bottom one is more dominated by slave morality/mistake theory (which is what "may the best idea win" fundamentally is).

The problem with calling it "socialists" or "conservatives" is that it isn't cutting cleanly enough across these axes because classical liberalism is currently a conservative position. Trying to conflate that and traditionalism really doesn't work all that well because the liberals are just as much at odds with the traditionalists as they are with the progressives if and when the winds change. Take the example of "there's porn in schools": the traditionalist answer is to remove everything that could excite a young woman, the progressive answer is to remove everything that could excite a young man, and the liberal answer is to notice that there's a steep decline in the rate of youth sex and the fact neither side can write good porn probably has something to do with it.

It's still a different rephrasing of horseshoe theory at its core, though.

Certain jobs confer not only money and status but a non-trivial amount of societal level power.

Being valuleless in the sense of not accomplishing anything isn't the same as valueless in the sense of you not getting anything from it.

So there's no contradiction between thinking a job is valueless, and wanting the job because it provides you with money and power. But if you think the job is valueless (in the first sense), you'll think of being "unqualified" a job as just an excuse to deny you money and power.