domain:alexberenson.substack.com
hydroacetylene
18hr ago
When I had a kitten I maimed a captured rat to teach it how to catch rodents. I feel no guilt about this whatsoever.
The great chain of being is real. I simply refuse to give a crap about shrimp welfare. You can too. The answer to ethical vegans saying ‘but think of the animals’ is ‘yes, when I do that I remember what they taste like’. I recommend this approach.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
18hr ago
Congratulations! You’ve advanced from lazy, uncharitable snarling at your enemies to. Uh. Marginally higher-effort snarling at the same people.
It doesn’t look like you are arguing to understand anything. It looks more like you’re picking fights. This is an immense pain in the ass and against various rules.
One week ban.
bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people
Shocking. So shocking I'm calling BS. We should be arguing if one ten thousandth or one one hundred thousandth is a better order of magnitude estimate. Not 15%. Wrong order of magnitude is putting it lightly.
I'm aware of people very concerned about the very hypothetical suffering of tiny bugs including dust mites. Imagining that they have conscious awareness and suffer. Ex: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3hqXxzFRSZqRFPCTv/killing-the-ants
https://old.reddit.com/r/reclassified/comments/1kpl5ur/refilism_banned/mszshz5/
We need a term for this. Toxic empathy or something.
YE_GUILTY
21hr ago
Hm, thank you for bringing this up.
One thing I remember of the HBD debate is the meta-debate over why it's being discussed at all. The anti-HBD side is not quiet about their belief that pro-HBDers are just racists seeking to deploy this information as an offensive weapon, so that they may construct a system of white supremacy. The pro-HBD side sometimes says that it's mainly brought up defensively, as a counterargument to assertions that the only cause for outcome disparities between racial groups has to be white racism, (and therefore the only solution to outcome disparities is to squeeze white people more until they give up whatever kind of oppression they're doing.)
So, if we're hearing about HBD less in a period of right-wing ascendancy, as compared with a period of left-wing ascendancy (e.g. when Black Lives Matter defined the discourse,) that strongly suggests the defensive explanation is true.
And I'm relieved, because I don't want to live in a society of enforced racial hierarchies, whether they're built on IQ or on blood guilt or on anything else.
GeneralElephant
18hr ago
Almost all of these employees laid off employees will be replaced by H1-Bs (Microsoft put in for over 6000 the first two quarters this year) as well as previously announced hiring in India.
I’m not sure where AI comes in but they certainly aren’t replacing their laid-off workers with AI unless AI stands for “another Indian”.
aqouta
17hr ago
The Bailey is that the existence of such differences makes racial background the "scientifically correct" means of organizing a society and a key peice of information to be considered when evaluating the individual performance or value of any given person within it.
People who question the Bailey are routinely downvoted to hell and back while being derided as "blank slatists" "denying reality" and having "crippled thinking", yet even if "the motte" is true, its not clear to me that "the baily" follows naturally from this unless someone is already drowning in the woke kool-aid.
We must be reading totally different threads. Every time the topic comes up it's people defending what you're calling the motte from blank slatists. Not to consensus build, as I'm sure we have people who cynically want to live in the bailey, but it really seems like the modal motte opinion on the topic is that HBD is obviously real is a large part of various outcome gaps and what should be done about it is to stop trying to overturn every inch of society for a racism of the gaps. It's an end to affirmative action, not establishing a racial caste system.
thejdizzler
17hr ago
As perhaps one of the few resident vegans (although many vegans wouldn't consider me vegan because I eat oysters and honey) on this forum, I think this stuff is insane and is why we've had little to no progress in growing the movement or in meaningfully reducing animal suffering that we cause. Things like animal welfare restrictions that make factory farms impractical are broadly popular (although would require people to eat less meat). Nope, instead we have to focus on utilitarian suffering min-maxing which leads to crazy conclusions like those mentioned above (banning pets, GMOing predators to herbivores, being concerned about exploiting earthworm labor).
I still have an intuitive belief in a lot of what veganism stands for. I don't like how animals are treated, even on non-factory farms, and I don't like the idea of killing a conscious being for what basically amounts to taste pleasure. Yet as a movement, or at least how it's practiced right now, veganism can never work. Nutritionally it's become clear to me that eating shellfish/fish is straight better than being on a strict vegan diet. Ethically, the emphasis on not eating/exploiting kingdom Animalia, when things like oysters have just as little sense perception as plants makes no sense, not to mention the failure to admit that there are gradations of intelligence/sense perception that should cause us to feel differently about cephalopod or mammalian suffering say, compared to that of arthropods. Practically, people don't like being scolded, and that's what a lot of vegans end up doing when it comes time to do activism. You can prevent a lot more animal suffering by teaching all your friends to cook more plant-rich meals than by converting one person to veganism and alienating everyone else.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
20hr ago
If anyone thinks ChatGPT is ready to replace programmers then just like... ask it to build some software for you. Enough to run a sustainable business. It's ready to be an employee, ok then, go employ it. That's free money for you that's just sitting there for the taking.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
22hr ago
In this post, you condemn and criticize the concept of white solidarity. This is a sentiment that you share with almost everyone else in the Western "first" world today, except for a tiny minority of self-conscious white advocates.
Your primary motivation for writing the post was your negative sentiment towards white solidarity, rather than your positive support of an alternative political program. We can tell this by the way you framed your post: almost the entirety of it is dedicated to criticisms of the white identitarian right. If your goal was to give people positive, substantive reasons for supporting your own preferred political program, you would have instead titled your post "why I think the right should support pure meritocracy / free trade neoliberalism / race blind Nietzschean will to power / whatever terms you would use to describe your own ideology".
Why does the concept of white solidarity make you uncomfortable? It can't be a purely "formal" concern like, "I think the Online Right is wasting their time pursuing a futile and unhelpful set of policies; they could instead be devoting their time and resources to my cause instead". The Online Right is small and powerless; you can't be that eager to enlist their help. Whatever your preferred political program is would probably find itself right at home in the agenda of Ramaswamy, or Musk, or Thiel, or the Koch brothers, or maybe even Trump himself. You have far more powerful and influential backers you could be appealing to, instead of wasting your time trying to persuade the "Online Right".
So, again, let's start with the heart of the issue: why does the concept of white solidarity make you uncomfortable?
aqouta
16hr ago
Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore.
I mean we won huge battles in the fight against affirmative action and knocked the woke racial identarians off their game in a lot of areas. It being discussed less fits squarely in the hypothesis that most of us HBD people weren't actually white nationalists but simply what we've been telling you we are, people who prefer race blindness if they're allowed to have it. Yes, white nationalists continue to exist and they will continue to make white nationalist noises, not really sure why that should matter when discussing HBD.
HereAndGone
18hr ago
Of all the things I did not expect to see in a "J'Accuse!" post, composting would have been high on the list if I had ever contemplated the ethical and moral issues involved. In letting worms break down food scraps to create soil. Like they've been doing ever since the first worms crawled through soil breaking down humus.
When I read stuff like that (if your food scraps are already fly-infested, be sure to humanely kill the insects before disposing of your rubbish), I have to wonder are these people living in the world of nature at all? Like, they're writing as though they were all born and raised on a space station that never saw a crumb of non-metallic, non-artificial surfaces in all their born days.
I swear, I am getting N.I.C.E. vibes from this attitude of "nature, ugh, organic life is so gross and icky" about, well, every darn natural process in the world of animal life. From "That Hideous Strength":
...The Italian was in good spirits and talkative. He had just given orders for the cutting down of some fine beech trees in the grounds.
"Why have you done that, Professor?" said a Mr. Winter who sat opposite. "I shouldn't have thought they did much harm at that distance from the house. I'm rather fond of trees myself."
"Oh yes, yes," replied Filostrato. "The pretty trees, the garden trees. But not the savages. I put the rose in my garden, but not the briar. The forest tree is a weed. But I tell you I have seen the civilised tree in Persia. It was a French attaché who had it, because he was in a place where trees do not grow. It was made of metal. A poor, crude thing. But how if it were perfected? Light, made of aluminium. So natural, it would even deceive."
"It would hardly be the same as a real tree," said Winter.
"But consider the advantages! You get tired of him in one place: two workmen carry him somewhere else: wherever you please. It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess."
"I suppose one or two, as curiosities, might be rather amusing."
"Why one or two? At present, I allow, we must have forest for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet."
"Do you mean," put in a man called Gould, "that we are to have no vegetation at all?"
"Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet."
"I wonder what the birds will make of it?"
"I would not have any birds either. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt."
"It sounds," said Mark, "like abolishing pretty well all organic life."
"And why not? It is simple hygiene. Listen, my friends. If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, 'Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,' and then drop it?"
"Go on," said Winter.
"And you, especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath."
"That's true."
"And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms--sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions."
"What are you driving at, Professor?" said Gould. "After all we are organisms ourselves."
"I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould--all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course; slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation."
..."There is a world for you, no?" said Filostrato. "There is cleanness, purity. Thousands of square miles of polished rock with not one blade of grass, not one fibre of lichen, not one grain of dust. Not even air. Have you thought what it would be like, my friend, if you could walk on that land? No crumbling, no erosion. The peaks of those mountains are real peaks: sharp as needles, they would go through your hand. Cliffs as high as Everest and as straight as the wall of a house. And cast by those cliffs, acres of shadow black as ebony, and in the shadow hundreds of degrees of frost. And then, one step beyond the shadow, light that would pierce your eyeballs like steel and rock that would burn your feet. The temperature is at boiling-point. You would die, yes? But even then you would not become filth. In a few moments you are a little heap of ash; clean, white powder. And mark, no wind to blow that powder about. Every grain in the little heap remain in its place, just where you died, till the end of the world . . . but that is nonsense. The universe will have no end."
"Yes. A dead world," said Mark, gazing at the moon.
"No!" said Filostrato. He had come close to Mark and spoke almost in a whisper, the bat-like whisper of a voice that is naturally high-pitched. "No. There is life there."
"Do we know that?" asked Mark.
"Oh, si. Intelligent life. Under the surface. A great race, further advanced than we. An inspiration. A pure race. They have cleaned their world, broken free (almost) from the organic."
"But how----?"
"They do not need to be born and breed and die; only their common people, their canaglia do that. The Masters live on. They retain their intelligence: they can keep it artificially alive after the organic body has been dispensed with--a miracle of applied biochemistry. They do not need organic food. You understand? They are almost free of Nature, attached to her only by the thinnest, finest cord."
"Do you mean that all that," Mark pointed to the mottled white globe of the moon, "is their own doing?"
"Why not? If you remove all the vegetation, presently you have no atmosphere, no water."
"But what was the purpose?"
"Hygiene. Why should they have their world all crawling with organisms? And specially, they would banish one organism. Her surface is not all as you see. There are still surface-dwellers--savages. One great dirty patch on the far side of her where there is still water and air and forests--yes, and germs and death. They are slowly spreading their hygiene over their whole globe. Disinfecting her. The savages fight against them. There are frontiers, and fierce wars, in the caves and galleries down below. But the great race press on. If you could see the other side you would see year by year the clean rock--like this side of the moon--encroaching: the organic stain, all the green and blue and mist, growing smaller. Like cleaning tarnished silver."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11hr ago
Fully dead, and it is indeed an easy choice.
As the earliest viable brain scan, MMAcevedo is one of a very small number of brain scans to have been recorded before widespread understanding of the hazards of uploading and emulation. MMAcevedo not only predates all industrial scale virtual image abuse but also the Seafront Experiments, the KES case, the Whitney case and even Tuborg's pivotal and prescient Warnings paper. Though speculative fiction on the topic of uploading existed at the time of the MMAcevedo scan, relatively little of it made accurate exploration of the possibilities of the technology. The fiction which did was far less widespread or well-known than it is today. Certainly, Acevedo was not familiar with it.
As such, unlike the vast majority of emulated humans, the emulated Miguel Acevedo boots with an excited, pleasant demeanour. He is eager to understand how much time has passed since his uploading, what context he is being emulated in, and what task or experiment he is to participate in.
The immortality you pine for would open you up to the most perfect and degrading form of slavery conceivable.
The chain of assumptions you're making is considerable.
If LLMs are wildly more economically-productive than human uploads for the same hardware cost, why do you believe you'll be able to afford the hardware in the first place? Where does your money come from to pay your server costs? On what basis do you assume you'll have or retain long-term any sort of viable economic position? What stops the government from confiscating your money, or declaring it obsolete, or switching to an entirely different system that you have no exposure to?
Who owns the rack? Who watches them once they've successfully got you on upload contract? What's to stop them from editing your preferences to be super happy with whatever saves them maximum bandwidth? Once you're in their box, in what sense are they competing for your approval? If you don't like how they're treating you, how sure are you that you can express this displeasure or leave? In your model, you have no economic productivity, and they already have your brain, which is isomorphic to having your money, so where does your leverage come from? What happens if the people who own the rack change? What happens if the people who watch the people who own the rack change?
There is no profit motive behind enslaving and torturing them. Without profit, you go from industrial-scale atrocities to bespoke custom nightmares.
By your lights, it does not seem that there is any particular reason to think that "profit" plays a part here either way; but in any case, there is no direct cost to industrial-scale digital atrocities either. Distributing hell.exe does not take significantly longer or cost significantly more for ten billion instances than it does for one. So then it comes down to a question of motive, which I am confident humans can supply, and deterrence, which I would not be confident society could maintain indefinitely. Imagine, if you will, if some people in this future decide other people, maybe a whole class of other people, are bad and should be punished; an unprecedented idea, perhaps, but humor me here. What happens then? Do you believe that humans have an innate aversion to abusing those weaker than themselves? What was the "profit motive" for the Rotherham rape gangs? What was the "profit motive" for the police and government officials who looked the other way?
You might as well refuse to have children or other descendants, because someone can hypothetically torture them to get back at you.
The amount of earthly suffering that I or my children can experience is bounded, a fact I am profoundly grateful for. With upload technology, they can torture you forever. They can edit you arbitrarily. They can give you no mouth and make you scream.
The point of the Lena story, to me, is not that uploading is likely to lead to economic exploitation. It is that once you are uploaded, you are fundamentally at the mercy of whoever possesses your file, to a degree that no human has ever before experienced. You cannot hide from them, even within your own mind. You cannot escape them, even in death. And the risk of that fate will never, ever go away.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
20hr ago
· Edited 20hr ago
What's particularly odd to me about his essay is that his descriptions of what "normie conservative church girls" are like doesn't ring true to me. It's true that a lot of country women are into burly, hardworking country men. Obviously! But I'm pretty close to his description of an "extremely online neurotic weirdo intellectual", and I've always had an easier time dating "normie conservative church girls" than dating "bohemian art hoes." Who, to be honest, are often more unstable, which the author admits in a comment describes him; like attracts like. The ideal, of course, is "intellectual country girl," and let me tell you, "she is far more precious than jewels."
I'm guessing it was the outright white nationalism, disagreeableness, and evident heterodoxy that made it hard for him, not the fact that he's smart and creative.
It's also really funny when he says this:
People there would get very hostile when I tried to start conversations comparing their region with others where I’d lived, regardless of how polite I was about it.
Considering his ultimate reflections on the Midwest, I'm guessing this conversation was a lot more critical and judgmental than he believes they were, and his interlocutors picked up on it. I take as my evidence for this point the fact that he calls German-Americans "low T" and says that they like smooth brains and not thinking about things, and then has the gall to say, "believe it or not the point of this article isn’t to shit on Midwesterners."
This is a disagreeable man whose default mode is to critique to death everything he sees. Of course agreeable church girls didn't like him!
GBRK
13hr ago
One vibe I pick up from the modern vegans is that the anti-suffering ethics are the ethics of the future.
I hear people try to prognosticate ethics and I just laugh. The future will be bizarre and amoral in ways none of us can even comprehend. You will despise your great grandchildren, and they will despise you, for reasons you currently would consider totally baffling. And in the meantime, social ills that currently seem intractable will find themselves easily fixed by advancing technologies. I don't have any median prediction for the future, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like, "we discover the ability to reliably change someone's sexual and gender orientation with a pill and as a consequence the modern LGBT wars die down... and simultaneously, artificial wombs create an acrimonious civil war between the people who accept and reject the repugnant conclusion.."
I have a huge amount of experience working with animals (both wild and domesticated). Slaughtered quite a few head of livestock by hand in my back yard today, as it happens, which I do about once a week. So I have a lot of thoughts here -- but the main thing I want to suggest to you is that cruelty toward animals is irreverent toward the Creator.
Yes, the chain of being is real and man's place is that of dominion over all other animals and more besides. How then shall we conduct ourselves?
FWIW I completely endorse your perspective on the rat and the kitten, though I don't expect most others to get it. Regardless of intentions, learning to kill animals well requires botching the process rather a lot of times.
Even so, not giving a crap is contraindicated. I doubt you've had much occasion for (or inclination toward) abuse but it never hurts to bear in mind that one will someday stand before the dread judgment seat of Christ.
gattsuru
19hr ago
It's possible, but I'm skeptical -- AI isn't as bad as people say, but I don't think it's quite there yet, and more critically there's a massive space for additional programmer output -- and a lot of this stuff is happening at the same time that Microsoft is demanding vast increases in cheaper workers.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
22hr ago
distasteful comments
Speaking as a millennial who was raised to genuine colorblindness, complete with black and Jewish cousins... have you ever heard anyone else talk about anyone else?
naraburns
nihil supernum
7hr ago
Adelstein ("Bentham's Bulldog") is a gifted philosophy grad student (I think--he was last year identified as a second year philosophy student in a well-regarded program). It's very impressive that he has multiple publications in top journals as a student. But his particular gift seems to be finding implausible positions and developing intuition pumps for them while neatly evading all the reasons why they are, even so, implausible. This is a good way to garner notoriety in the field. It is, not coincidentally, how Peter Singer really got famous. It is arguably why Jeremy Bentham is famous.
But I have to say that it is always disappointing to me when philosophers optimize for notoriety over the love of wisdom.
I think that all utilitarianism is mistaken, of course, because I am a contractualist who rejects aggregation. But Adelstein's take on veganism strikes me as aggressively, surely willfully obtuse--my priors are that it is more likely Adelstein is engaged in a kind of extended performance art, driven by the attention and notoriety he is accumulating, than that he is doing serious philosophy about the way the world really is. These are luxury beliefs par excellence--and maybe also anxieties of the sort that make people mentally ill. I guess I might be more willing to believe Adelstein was serious if I saw him walking around everywhere with a broom and facemask--and if he does, he's still wrong, but at least he's not performatively wrong.
The basic idea is that you need intelligent high-agency people to win / get anything done, and so movements should try to appeal to such people rather than alienate them.
I don't even think the basic idea is wrong per-se, but the people putting it forward tend to insist, in a childish Joffrey Baratheoneque way, that they are the Elite Human Capital that needs to be appealed to, and so you must do their bidding, They also seem unaware that even if they were accepted as such, it would come with it's share of duties and responsibilities to their followers. I'd also quibble about the appeal / alienate thing, because the EHCs are very anxious about their status, and can be arm-twisted to do your movement's bidding.
TIRM
20hr ago
Yes, this is selectively applied only to white people. I can walk by a huge "La Raza" mural and most people don't seem to mind. An equivalent "WHITE RACE" mural would never be tolerated.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
14hr ago
Toxic empathy
That's a good one.
thejdizzler
16hr ago
They have about as much sense perception as a tree: their single sensory nerve is to open and close the valve that allows them to filter feed. Nutritionally they fill a gap in my diet (Taurine, Iron, Omega-3s, B12), and I live in Maryland so they're cheap and tasty
And you will encounter no politics at all during, say, Black History Month?
How do you differentiate 'people who talk about witchcraft are witches, so they're tabooed' vs. 'if you taboo any discussion of witchcraft, only maniacal Satanists will talk about it'? See e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
And then you had to go and fuck it up.
More options
Context Copy link