domain:alakasa.substack.com
MajorSomeday
11mo ago
From this exchange it became clear to me that no one bothers to investigate the etymology of words, where they came from, how they are defined, and what they actually mean.
Why do you believe that etymology helps you to know what a word actually means?
Etymology is interesting, but it’s almost totally unrelated to meaning. Even Websters dictionary doesn’t try to do that — they’re explicitly descriptive, not prescriptive.
Words are defined by how they’re used. That’s it.
Yes, it’s frustrating when people intentionally use the wrong word trying to sway public opinion, and it’s frustrating when you can’t pin down people on what they mean because of shifting definitions. But none of that is new nor unique to the left.
theincompetencetheorist
11mo ago
For this reason I think it is unsurprising that so many leftist forms of social media - I will call out Reddit and Twitter in particular - are geared towards short-form content: 280 character posts;
Leftist in this case just "co-opted by the establishment" and if that establishment milieu would have been to the right at the time of co-option would have been on the right. Both of these sites have had owners (until recently with Twitter) that has accepted losses on them. They have never been profitable, yet the establishment through investment have been pouring money into them. We need to stop ourselves and ask why? Is it because these are the factories where our consent is manufactured? Is it the battlefields where culture war is waged? Is it the place where they can put their thumbs on the algorithmic scales to nudge us to consume certain content? Are these the places where our internet culture is formed? Simply put 'Cui Bono?' because the sites themselves aren't profitable but yet investments are poured in!
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
11mo ago
Note that "what you want to hear" most is useful information.
You need to finish reading the sentence - "even if they have to make up what you want to hear". Interrogators do not have magical powers that can let them determine if information is useful or just useful-sounding. I have no doubt that a committed torturer could extract any kind of confession they wanted from me, even ones that aren't true. That's the entire problem with torture - you get an immense false positive rate that causes big problems for the reliability of information. Even your own hypothetical armchair scenario shows the flaw - if only one of your five suspects actually knows the location of the base or bomb that they've planted and the rest have to make it up, torture is worse than useless if you have any sort of time pressure or resource constraints.
because I'm not the one trying to make a sweeping claim. All it takes is one situation where torture works for your motivated reasoning to fall apart.
Go back and point out the "motivated reasoning" in my post, and make sure that this reasoning would fall apart with a single potential counterexample - because I couldn't find that argument in my post. My actual point is that torture is a technique with limited effectiveness due to a high false positive rate, and your argument that you can account for a high rate of false positives by spending time and resources investigating them does not even rise to the level of a refutation of my point. Yes, if you spend more resources you can account for the problems of torture, but the fact that these problems can be compensated for with time and money does not mean that they do not exist. When you look at it in the context of modern intelligence-gathering capabilities, torture is so far down the list of effectiveness that it is barely even worth talking about. We live in surveillance states that engage in deep and sophisticated algorithmic profiling of every single citizen and a lot of them have live video monitoring of important places. It is largely impossible to engage in commercial transactions at scale without drawing the interest and attention of those surveillance bodies, and if we're going to say "fuck Civil Liberties, maximal effectiveness now" I highly doubt any torture would actually take place due to the impossibility of keeping enough information secret from the panopticon that has been constructed around us for it to even be worthwhile.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
I think we'll end up with a single truly unitary state. AI naturally centralizes power. In principle, you could have a robotic mine, robotic power plant, robotic industrial economy, robotic soldiers, all centrally coordinated by a superintelligence. That is surely more efficient than having hundreds of millions of people running around, doing all those things, scheming against eachother, failing to communicate or coordinate.
Whether the superintelligence is autonomous or under someone's control doesn't really matter, it'll effectively be a single-actor, unitary state with many appendages. Now maybe you have a small oligarchy of human controllers - I think this is unstable. Where there are people, there are disagreements and internal conflicts. None of them gain from having the cooperation of the others like old-timey oligarchs, they don't have their own independent power base or wealth sources. They're all using the same source of power. Eventually it would decay down to rule by one person, or one AI.
I think a large, democratic system is better in moral terms but harder to achieve and less competitive. Ideally, I'd like to see a world where we all have our own sovereign resource base as some kind of posthuman. I might have the bulk of my assets in an iron mine on an asteroid, Steve might have a manufacturing facility orbiting Mercury, we trade and retain our own sovereign military strength. Citizen-soldiers but in space and with more guns. Power is decentralized such that the majority can gang up on the wealthy elite if they behave egregiously. Decisions are made democratically, such that the status quo can't be overthrown. But how could we get to this state? We'd need a benign, altruistic, non-powerseeking libertarian to provide the technology to everyone and disperse it, such that each has power over their own destiny.
Some people have said 'Xi Jinping or Altman don't seem like they're going to exterminate humanity'. I believe that power corrupts. Those who come up with superintelligence first will try to hoard its fruits. They don't want enemies to threaten them and power is seductive. I think there will be a decisive strategic advantage coming up, that someone will get self-improving AGI at some point that can then spit out a bunch of really powerful inventions too quickly for states to handle. Or maybe there's some architecture change that puts the machine up to superhuman intellect immediately. The first to get to self-improvement wins the game, then nobody can resist them.
What does immortality and absolute power do to people? What sort of pettiness or humiliation rituals are we going to experience? Consider what our current elites do with their immense wealth and power. Then consider that there would be some kind of sifting mechanism where the most aggressive and conniving are more likely to get ultimate control (by betraying their brethren and seizing control). In the long run, I think we all die, if we are merely subjects of some AI-controller.
Only a slow take-off could keep us away from a unitary state and progress seems to be anything but slow.
Voyager
11mo ago
If men wanting attractive women to sleep with them is a harmful notion of masculinity, I'm rather concerned about the future of humanity.
Tophattingson
11mo ago
The broader problem is that applying woke cancellation standards evenly would mean cancelling probably 99% of the population of the big upcoming market that everyone wants to sell stuff to. Cancelling the CCP is the rock upon which the ship of cancel culture sinks, mainly for reasons of sheer impracticality.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11mo ago
Interesting. That would imply that Thiel is a fully paid up member, and “no billionaires on the dissident right” is a No True Scotsman of the word “dissident”
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11mo ago
Yes - I was pointing out the sorts of places where pro-establishment Reds hang out. The Red/Blue model is exclusively American - the urban/rural political divide exists everywhere, but there is no equivalent of the suburban White South in most countries.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11mo ago
Oh no, has someone been hoisted by their own petard?
Voyager
11mo ago
I can't really begrudge women for not making that argument any more than I begrudge myself for not making the argument that all gyms should be banned so fewer guys are buffer than me so I can get more chicks. I would like it if they were but I can't make the argument.
But are you making the argument that gyms should be banned because of toxic masculinity or [insert made-up argument]? If so, that's unethical, if not, the comparison doesn't work out.
So China is sort of a big place. With a bit of effort you can dig evidence in any direction: that China is democratic, that China is woke, that China has a problem with murderous cardiologists, that China
…makes no secret of its eugenic ambitions, in either its cultural history or its government policies.
For generations, Chinese intellectuals have emphasized close ties between the state (guojia), the nation (minzu), the population (renkou), the Han race (zhongzu), and, more recently, the Chinese gene-pool (jiyinku). Traditional Chinese medicine focused on preventing birth defects, promoting maternal health and "fetal education" (taijiao) during pregnancy, and nourishing the father's semen (yangjing) and mother's blood (pingxue) to produce bright, healthy babies (see Frank Dikötter's book Imperfect Conceptions). Many scientists and reformers of Republican China (1912-1949) were ardent Darwinians and Galtonians. They worried about racial extinction (miezhong) and "the science of deformed fetuses" (jitaixue), and saw eugenics as a way to restore China's rightful place as the world's leading civilization after a century of humiliation by European colonialism.
One of Deng's legacies is China's current strategy of maximizing "Comprehensive National Power". This includes economic power (GDP, natural resources, energy, manufacturing, infrastructure, owning America's national debt), military power (cyberwarfare, anti-aircraft-carrier ballistic missiles, anti-satellite missiles), and 'soft power' (cultural prestige, the Beijing Olympics, tourism, Chinese films and contemporary art, Confucius Institutes, Shanghai's skyscrapers). But crucially, Comprehensive National Power also includes "biopower": creating the world's highest-quality human capital in terms of the Chinese population's genes, health, and education (see Governing China's Population by Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winkler).
Chinese biopower has ancient roots in the concept of "yousheng" ("good birth"—which has the same literal meaning as "eugenics"). For a thousand years, China has been ruled by a cognitive meritocracy selected through the highly competitive imperial exams. The brightest young men became the scholar-officials who ruled the masses, amassed wealth, attracted multiple wives, and had more children. The current "gaokao" exams for university admission, taken by more than 10 million young Chinese per year, are just the updated version of these imperial exams—the route to educational, occupation, financial, and marital success. With the relaxation of the one-child policy, wealthier couples can now pay a "social fostering fee" (shehui fuyangfei) to have an extra child, restoring China's traditional link between intelligence, education, wealth, and reproductive success.
Chinese eugenics will quickly become even more effective, given its massive investment in genomic research on human mental and physical traits. BGI-Shenzhen employs more than 4,000 researchers. It has far more "next-generation" DNA sequencers that anywhere else in the world, and is sequencing more than 50,000 genomes per year. It recently acquired the California firm Complete Genomics to become a major rival to Illumina.
The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China.
After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.
There is unusually close cooperation in China between government, academia, medicine, education, media, parents, and consumerism in promoting a utopian Han ethno-state.
My real worry is the Western response. The most likely response, given Euro-American ideological biases, would be a bioethical panic that leads to criticism of Chinese population policy with the same self-righteous hypocrisy that we have shown in criticizing various Chinese socio-cultural policies.
But then:
Chinese scientist who produced genetically altered babies sentenced to 3 years in jail
China takes itself out of the race towards the Biosingularity
and of course
Welcome Polygenically Screened Babies. «Her name was Aurea, meaning "dawn"». Virginia, USA.
What I've learned is that Westerners can reliably dig up some random impressively-sounding titles and half-bullshit Orientalist translations demonstrating some grandiose coordinated Chinese agenda, and yet nothing. ever. happens. The Chinese nation does not have the capacity to act in its rational self-interest. The half that's not bullshit is mostly big character posters and interests of individual powerless weirdoes.
The director of the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence argues AGI is an all-important topic? You don't say.
Attention must be given to the development of general artificial intelligence, fostering an innovative ecosystem, and prioritizing risk prevention.
Why not bold it like that instead? By the way you can listen the Congressional discussion and dig some much more ambitious quotes. Including «even if we pause to prevent risks, Choyna won't». Can you imagine Xi saying «we shouldn't focus too much on risks of AGI progress, because Americans won't»? I can't.
And did Xi talk to their equivalent of Sam Altman? Or is this just impotent political sloganeering into vacuum, one more conference among hundreds – about agriculture, climate change, real estate, football?
AI training can be brute-forced with trailing-edge chips at the price of higher capital costs and power costs. China has no shortage of either and they have an enormous amount of trailing edge wafer production.
Yes, but what does this matter for AI? Do you have any evidence that they prioritize AI work with those trailing edge chips?
I think they're straight up going to plug them in Xiaomi robot vacuums and those atrocious barking dog toys. This is what the challenger to American hegemony looks like.
shouldn't the US be able to recruit enough soldiers to meet army and navy recruiting goals?
Americans have always been subpar in direct combat and prevailed through air and artillery advantage, so this doesn't matter, especially in this age.
Well they finished Tianhe-3 back in 2021 and they apparently have another exascale supercomputer
This is normie shit for oil and gas exploration. Where are their AI supercomputers? Yeah, you're right: they use AWS. Do you suppose relying on regulators being «dopey» is a clever move? No, it's desperation. And they don't train anything of strategic importance in any case. It's more commercial and surveillance gimmicks, boring dystopia infrastructure, not AGI.
Elon fucking Musk has over 1 exaFLOPS of DL-relevant performance on a single pod. Google sports 4-exaFLOPS tier pods. God knows what Gemini is being trained on. By 2025, Americans will reach zettascale. Again, China is as relevant as the Czech Republic.
What about 'biding our time', the strategy they used so effectively
A nice cope, I suppose. One a Kung Fu sage could come up with in the MMA cage.
They'll keep biding their time, while Americans eat their lunch, their supper, their dinner and their nation.
You laugh but those MANPADs and ATGMs would be useful to have defending Taipei
Yes, excuse me but I'll laugh. Taiwan is a red herring, Americans can nuke the whole island just to be sure nothing goes to PRC, and it's impossible to defend TSMC anyway; if the invasion starts, fabs go down.
AGI can be completed with already available hardware, and the US-led bloc has like 95% of it, and total control over means of production. Intel has many 10nm-capable fabs and will have 5nm by 2025. China will maybe have 7nm in 2030 or something, if they don't implode first from overregulating pork, or a housing bubble, or some other absurd problem.
They've been building a giant fleet
A very Chinese strategy: build a massive junk fleet for the era of robot wars. Have you seen their exercises? Such moving choreography.
Likewise, if somebody isn't proudly proclaiming their progress, perhaps they have made little. Or perhaps they're concealing what they've achieved so as not to draw attention.
Or perhaps they want you to think that, so you're too wary to deliver the finishing blow.
Or perhaps they're just too busy to think about any of this, preoccupied with their small mercantile interests, unchanged in millenia, while the West rushes into posthuman Singularity.
You have to understand I hoped it won't be like this. I hoped that if not my own country, then China will be able to provide a second pole. I wanted to have a minimally livable refuge from GAE, somewhere on the outskirts of Chinese project – in some African mineral supplier or in Thailand, whatever. But that depended on China not squandering this decade. Not shooting themselves in the foot. Not being cartoon villains. Being actually rational.
But that wasn't their role.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
I have known people with ostensibly room temperature IQs who were simultaneously astute observers and efficient problem solvers. I have also known people who supposedly had IQs in the 150+ range who were effectively retarded and incapable of functioning without strict supervision.
Did you measure the IQs under controlled settings in either case?
FistfullOfCrows
11mo ago
This is why I'm not interested in the doom saying people have about AI and the current crop of LLMs, we already have a "general" artificial intelligence that's at best indifferent and at worst malicious, they are called corporations and they are globally distributed.
Induced demand is an argument against expansions because reducing congestion is a common argument in favor.
So... ignoring externalities, it's okay to widen roads as long as it's for the right reason? (e.g. not to reduce congestion, but to be able to let more people go where they want to go)
And again, I see proposals all the time for demolishing roads, or road diets, based off of induced demand too. It's not just an argument against expansion, it's an argument in favor of de-expansion. (But of course they also bring up externalities to argue for de-expansion too, not just induced demand.)
I'm not sure if you just haven't ever looked up the actual capacity of different methods or what, but a slower method being less congested doesn't make sense. Their made advantage is that they take up vastly less space per person, space being extremely valuable and limited in more populated areas.
Interesting infographic, but what's the actual usage of those modes? If you're going to make the argument that they take up less space per person, you need to take into account actual usage, and not just theoretical capacity. (And for a true apples-to-apples comparison, you also need to make sure you're comparing trips with origins and destinations in the same places.) For example, for buses, the space taken up often ends up being higher than cars if there's low ridership and the buses are bigger than necessary.
And - assuming they do take up less space per person - so what? They just don't get congested from magically induced demand if they take up less space? I still don't understand why demand doesn't just magically get induced to the point that the trains are overcrowded like they are in Mumbai. They may take up less space... but then doesn't that just mean more people will be crammed in? If a highway had only motorcycle traffic and was completely congested, then gets widened and the demand gets magically induced, wouldn't the highway be once again congested with motorcycle traffic, even though motorcycles take up less space than cars?
(Also, transit naturally lends itself to congestion pricing--if major roads had toll roads with congestion pricing, that would substantially reduce congestion!).
So you would be okay with widening roads if the roads were tolled with congestion pricing?
It's not the same, because you can fit vastly more capacity into less space.
Sure, but the cost of bulldozing is likely still the same, depending on the way the buildings next to the tracks were built. (You can't just demolish only half a building.)
Trains also often go underground, although I don't think most US cities need that.
To build trains underground (such as a subway system), you would need to first knock down the buildings, then build the tunnels, then re-build the buildings. Which ends up being even worse than just knocking down the buildings and not re-building them, instead just building the new tracks on the surface.
What is the point of a 7 billion dollar, multi-year project that will be obsolete in less time than it took to complete?
A lot of the cost (including time) is from general cost disease, which sadly plagues American public transit too (e.g. Paris's transit budget is lower than NYC's but they get more stuff done). But again, it's only obsolete if you only care about reducing congestion and not about providing more people the ability to travel through the highway.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
I cannot think of any post-Cold War example of a large democracy sliding into authoritarianism.
Depending on your definition of "democracy" and "large", Hong Kong might be an example. It's gone from mostly free elections to a situation where the opposition has basically given up. Venezuela is another contestable example.
However, in both cases, these are special cases which don't serve as widespread models. Not even many Latin American socialists see Venezuela's "Socialism of the 21st Century" as a model any more, while Hong Kong is basically a case of salami tactics in which an economically advanced semi-free democracy is being absorbed into a less advanced but much larger superpower. I don't know of anyone who wants to their country to become like Hong Kong, especially as it loses economic ground to Singapore as the financial hub of Asia.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
I think the concept of government is, like, melting. It used to be oriented around war, but wars are getting rarer and governments are getting disoriented now that they've lost their original reason to exist. Now they're just power for power's sake, unmoored from anything, floundering for a purpose and settling on something between welfare state and propaganda state.
And safetyist state. As humanity ages and becomes more neurotic and/or risk averse, I expect governments to have a greater role, as agencies for (a) extracting resources from working-age people and distributing them towards larger, older cohorts, and (b) protecting people against ever smaller risks and discomforts.
Since neurotic risk-assessment is often incoherent and irrational, role (b) could end up looking very weird. A random example: a state interior minister in Germany said, in reaction to the 2015-2016 mass rapes of German women by immigrants:
What happens on the right-wing platforms and in chat rooms is at least as awful as the acts of those assaulting the women...
This man, who had power regarding the security of a large German state, literally said that unwholesome speech is as awful as sexual assault (maybe worse). And from a policing perspective, cracking down on people saying unwholesome things Twitter and Discord is a lot easier than solving rape, theft, or murder cases. The future could look very weird, because neuroticism is very weird, and rising neuroticism is the best explanation I have of safetyism. The safetyist state, like the welfare state, is rising out of democratic tendencies, but will change democracy into something unrecognisable to those who lived before it, and due to public choice reasons it may be as hard (for the forseeable future, impossible) to remove as the welfare state.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
Eldrich
Freudian slip?
OP says: "Assuming Fukuyama is wrong and it isn’t American-flavored liberal democracy until the heat death of the universe. What comes next, either probabilistically or from a perspective of the ‘next’ thing?"
And you say "Russia vs Ukraine"? Isn't this like saying "The mighty Roman Empire withstood Cannae, so it will never fall, not until the end of time!"
Only it's not even that big of a conflict, the US isn't even directly involved. It's like one of the umpteen times the Persians invade pro-Roman Armenia and saying 'oh well we're enduring this fine, we will never fail!' We haven't even seen how Ukraine-Russia ends, we're still in the middle of it.
All it takes is one big lost war and a seemingly invincible empire can fall like Icarus. Russia alone could end the US tomorrow, plunging the Northern Hemisphere into a sea of fire. I'm not bullish on India or South America in the general case but if the US, China and Europe lose their cities and get irradiated...
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