FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
Even European governments will semi-openly tell you they're working on AI that can clock terrorists from a picture of their face (as in: predicatively, not just matching them to a known terrorist), and apparently they got pretty good results.
This is not a capability I'm familiar with. Are we talking gait analysis, or is this a physiognomy thing?
High-value targets will have much better security (CCTV, gated communities, armored cars, armed security, etc), especially if that sort of thing takes off.
Are the foot-solder drone operators high-value? Are their families and friends? And again, this is one step out. There are a lot more steps obviously available, and each step imposes disproportionate resource and complexity costs on the defenders. It's possible that AI will solve the general case of the problem in the future, but at that point, it will also solve murder and drug-dealing in the general case as well. Do you think we are 10-15 years away from solving crime?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
It’s a 20 min video I tried skimming it but I am not sure on your point.
The threat elucidated is a suppressed sniper rifle, fired from total concealment at long range from inside a disposable vehicle which immediately departs and then is abandoned elsewhere, potentially a hundred miles or more away. How are you going to "detect the sniper shot"? Thermal imaging probably won't do it, and how do you know where to put the thermal camera? How are you going to get ubiquitous surveillance, and how much does this surveillance cost, and how vulnerable is it? Every capability you pursue increases the surface area vulnerable to attack. And again, this is one step. There are a lot more steps obviously available.
How is solving this problem easier than solving murder or drug-dealing in the general case? Do you think we are 10-15 years away from a general solution to the problems of murder and drug dealing?
That can all be true and drones are still a force that revolutionizes the battlefield in a way that reduces the role of small arms.
Drones will absolutely revolutionize the battlefield and will likewise absolutely reduce the role of small arms. Reduction is not elimination, nor is it necessarily "reduce to a negligable amount". Guns provide a tactical and logistical capability that is likely irreplicable.
It might be more complicated than rock paper scissors but that's not really saying anything. The typical American ideation of a group of armed men resisting the US government relied on a set of priors that drones all but eliminate.
But I'm not sure where you intend to find Americans who have the guts and ideological firmament to resist like the Taliban did outside of Amish communities. But in that case the victory condition is largely neither guns or drones.
This cuts both ways. You assume those resisting are complacent and cowardly, but you also assume those imposing tyranny have infinite courage and resolve. They don't, and in the words of the poet, they have moms. A fight of this nature would not look like the Taliban, because America is not Afghanistan, and Americans are not Afghans. It would be worse for the government in a whole variety of ways. It is very, very hard to make a bullet hitting you in the armpit from a thousand yards away with zero warning a negligible problem.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
Can you expound on the narrowness of my argument?
I would guess your model of "using guns against the government" involves something like a human-wave assault on a federal building by guys on foot armed with ar15s. This is about the worst possible mismatch, and it's still a threat drones cannot obviate now and may not be able to obviate in the future, given the continuous development of cheap, effective, man-portable anti-drone countermeasures.
Here is a scenario a single small step outside that frame. Leave aside the tribal shibboleths and focus on the material specifics: how would 300,000 autistic trannies and their drones under the Biden clone presidency effectively forestall this scenario?
In any case, that's all the illumination I'm comfortable providing on this topic.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
My main comprehension of the 2A purpose was to either war Britain invading the US or to go to war with US government. Guns don’t seem to have any relevance for that in 10-15 years.
If there is still a government comprised of humans in 10-15 years, guns will still be quite useful if it becomes necessary to fight it. My guess is that you think otherwise because you have a very narrow model of what it means to use a gun to fight the government. You aren't entirely wrong within that narrow frame, but outside it you are very wrong.
There is no plausible future where I would be better off without guns than with them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5hr ago
Ai Drones with guns are certainly going to outperform humans with guns in the medium-term, possibly even the short term. They don't outperform humans with guns at present.
Also, a gun on a drone is still a gun. Guns themselves remain useful because of their innate capabilities: low-cost standoff firepower.
Also, ubiquity: you may not have a drone, but you always have you. And guns are much, much easier to make and use than drones.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5hr ago
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6hr ago
You asked whether guns were obsolete at this point. At this point, no.
Drones will continue to improve. Drone defenses will likewise continue to improve, but I'm pretty sure there are going to continue to be ground units, and I'm pretty sure those ground units are going to want to be able to shoot things rather than just drone them; it's much, much cheaper. Also, those ground units are going to want to shoot at drones attacking them, which again is much cheaper than using your own drones. Almost certainly, they'll want to automate this into something like a mini-CIWS turret, but that turret will probably be using a gun.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6hr ago
This is the kind of person who has a rocky childhood, figures it out, and then kills his wife and kids at age 57.
I do not believe this is a valid "type" of person. That is to say, I do not believe that you can look at a random selection of people who had a rocky childhood and then figured it out, and then pick the ones in advance who are going to kill their wife and kids at age 57 at a rate significantly better than chance.
"This person will lifelong struggle with impulsivity" I find more plausible, but note that if insights of this sort were in fact considered broadly actionable, the criminal justice system's interaction with repeat offenders ought to look very, very different from the way it does.
We've recently discussed the connection between Psychology as a discipline and the law; this is a similar thread, it seems to me. When I blame Psychology as a discipline for Iryna, it's precisely because I observe psychologists individually and as a field advancing claims similar to the above, and I observe the strong impact those claims have had on how the criminal justice system operates and maintains its operation. Politicians justify releasing violent criminals from prison on the grounds that their problems are psychological, and thus implicitly treatable. They do this because Psychology has consistently claimed that this is the case. If Psychology said "we have no idea how to treat these people, we certainly don't think they should be released, we want no part of this and the consequences are on you if you let them go", the politicians, I think, would not be letting them go.
In that discussion, you seemed to be arguing that Psychology couldn't really predict criminal outcomes effectively, and so shouldn't be held accountable for bad outcomes delivered (in my understanding) by following their advice. But here you seem to be claiming that Psychologists can make accurate predictions about future criminal behavior, and so their advice should be followed even if based on nebulous evidence. Am I mistaken in this reading?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19hr ago
I read years ago that the Inuit were extremely fond of the .222 Remington, and used it for hunting anything and everything up to and including bear and moose. I don't think they were worrying about one-shot stops, though...
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
My understanding is that Fauci wrote in his diary that the mortality rate was one figure, and then went on TV and publicly claimed it was roughly ten times higher, and worked to get anyone repeating the accurate mortality he himself had privately accepted as genuine shouted down and censored.
Also, he knew it was lab made, and appeared outside a lab where he and his underlings had been funding research to produce exactly this sort of virus, despite such research explicitly being banned by the federal government. I'm planning a larger post on the subject, but my understanding is that it's straightforwardly true that Fauci generated one of the worst clusters of bad policy decisions of the last century, is directly responsible for something like 32 million human deaths and dozens of trillions of dollars in economic damage, along with vast and pernicious violations of a variety of human rights.
The fact that this is now all out in the open and the elite class is choosing to attempt, even at this late date, to aw shucks it back under the rug is... well, "enlightening" is a start. Personally, I intend to employ these facts as a cudgel from this point forward, and find it difficult to imagine why I shouldn't.
Drones defeat guns.
No, they don't. Guns are effectively a very specialized kind of drone, and the specialization they're good at hasn't gone away. It would be more accurate to say that guns defeat soldiers, but even this is highly contextual so long as we intend to keep having lots of humans around.
You can have a human operated machine gun and you will lose to a drone.
Maybe someday, certainly not yet.
But we probably? can not let people own fleets of AI controlled drones.
You probably won't be able to stop them from owning these for roughly the same reasons you can't actually meaningfully control guns if the public wants them.
The backdoor they have on your electric car will get turned off when you resist.
Okay. Why are illegal narcotics still a problem?
Technology and the ability to have industrial and post-industrial society has always been an issue the American Democracy and Freedom project.
It is, but for exactly the opposite of the reasons you're thinking. Too much order is probably not the basic problem you should be worrying about. I'm not worried that Wokes or whoever are going to establish a permanent tyranny. I'm much more worried they're going to try, and the way they fail is going to have my kids dead or reduced to eating cat food.
From a more general legal perspective, the point of gun cases is not to secure redress from the government, but rather to build common knowledge that the government is incapable of providing such redress.
I'm going to plead "Fearful Symmetry".
I vaguely remember the essay, but after a quick scan find I don't understand the reference. could you explain?
More generally, which of the three types of answers you enumerated would you say this falls under?
[edit] - to elaborate on my interest here a bit, I went to some effort to defend Meshkhout here in his discussion of the 2020 election fraud theories, despite strongly disagreeing with his general takeaways. I defended him because, near as I could see, he was explicitly attacking falsehoods other commenters here were repeating, and I think that's a good thing. I strongly disagree with his takeaway because I think he focused his attention very carefully and very intentionally on arguments he could prove were false, in an attempt to dismiss a general argument that is in fact pretty damning.
The Democrats actually, in fact, did a bunch of bad shit to win the 2020 election, and suffered zero consequences for doing so. As a starter, they used Federal security and legal agencies to harm the trump campaign and protect the Biden campaign. I do not believe that an election in which the FBI and Justice Department is breaking multiple laws to help one side and harm the other is a legitimate election. To the extent that you or Meshkhout do not believe that this sort of behavior is worth talking about, I am willing to concede my error: these tactics are legitimate, and therefore my side should exploit them freely for our own advantage, and I'm confident that you and Meshkhout will obviously agree.
...To loop this back around, the rhetorical strategy you are talking about is both real and effective. But at the end of the day, what you're seeing isn't some tool that helps clear the fog of partisanship; it's just another symptom of the core nature of culture war. You're seeing how the capacity to live together decays, as the necessarily-simple heuristics we rely on to keep the peace break down under the unbearable strain of incoherent values.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
But don't let that disabuse you that there is still a contingent of people who care about this in principle.
That contingent has proved itself utterly powerless to advance its aims. Attempts to actualize the principle will simply enable the cheap radical chic setup, while providing no perceptible advantage to the supposed principle. Given this inability, the cost/benefit for arguing in favor of protecting "bad" material should be reassessed; if toleration of things you consider bad observably does not secure toleration of things you consider good in turn, what is the point of extending such tolerance? Previous arguments assumed some sort of reciprocity, but that reciprocity observably does not exist, and so it is necessary to reassess those arguments in light of this new data.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
To sum up: "what is a woman?" and "who won the 2020 election?" can expose someone as a lunatic with crazy beliefs. But even if they don't, they can still expose them as a coward or a traitor to their cause, and in some cases that can be just as useful.
It seems to me that this is a reasonable approximation of your thesis statement for this post; correct me if I'm wrong.
Some other examples I think might add meaningfully to the concept-space you're exploring here: DignifAI was a meme where people used AI image generation to take bikini/lingerie/nude images of various e-girls, and digitally re-cloth them in modest garb. This greatly offended the e-girls and feminists generally, for reasons that they struggled to explain. Likewise, there was a short fad of using AI to take mixed-race family photos and convert them to same-race family photos, presented as "what could have been"; there was discussion of both here some time ago.
The through-line here are novel attacks that turn one's own ideological commitments against themselves, exposing weak points and contradictions.
The flip-side is, rhetoric is not reality, and reality cannot be held off indefinitely by frame games.
You identify "who won the 2020 election?" as an effective gambit, and so it is. So here's one back at you:
"Republicans should adopt the strategies used by Democrats in 2020 in every election going forward." Agree or disagree? I think we both can see that this is far less effective rhetorically than "who won the 2020 election". I would happily accept the lesser rhetorical effectiveness in exchange for the actual benefit of Republicans acting this way in the real world. Does that seem like a good trade to you?
"Reds think violence is a switch, Blues think violence is a dial" is a phrase being used as a common point of reference. Both of them think that the "switch" version doesn't actually work, and for similar reasons: Reds are sufficiently invested in stability and the future to be deterred from ever using political violence on the scale necessary for it to be a meaningful threat. Hence "the switch is rusted shut" is a perfect metaphor for their understanding of the situation. It's such an obvious metaphor that they both arrived at it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
This is probably a reference to the Left Behind novels, using them as a synecdoche for the particularly American strain of Zionist Christianity notably prevalent in the Bush era, with its memes about support for the modern state of Israel being commanded by God, and the modern state of Israel being key to the fulfillment of various end-times prophecies relating to the second coming of Christ.
I might argue the prevalence of this memeplex in the present, but it has, regrettably, actually been a thing, and his description of it does not strike me as particularly uncharitable.
I'd argue that you are cherrypicking here (perhaps unintentionally) to make your point. The 1619 project as I understand it was largely driven by media, not historians, in particular Nikole Hannah-Jones (a journalist).
It is true that the project was initiated by journalists and the media apparatus, rather than by historians directly. It's worth mentioning in passing that Journalism is also an academic field, and one that Hannah-Jones is reasonably likely to be inducted into in the future, given the evident status resulting from her project.
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Here is the 1619 project's bibliography. Pretty clearly, Jones drew heavily from "legitimate" academic and pseudo-academic sources (Kendi, Coates and similar, people it's not a good idea for an academic to disagree with) from a variety of fields, including history, in the production of her project. I am confident she was assisted in her project by many professional academics, including professional historians. She presented her project as history, and she was able to do so because actual historians provided her legitimized raw material and legitimized her output in turn.
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Within the field of history specifically, people spoke out. James H Sweet, President of the American Historical Association, penned an article titled Is History History?. An answer to the title's question might be inferred by the abject apology that now precedes the article, in which he defends precisely zero of his previous points.
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At least five other prominent historians were willing to speak out against it under their actual names, with the result that general descriptions note that it's controversial due to disputed accuracy of some elements of its narrative, making it indistinguishable from every other historical account ever written. In no way does this extremely limited pushback from within the discipline appear to have counteracted the 1619 project's effect on broader culture. The author has attacked those objecting to her project's lies as motivated by racism, and claimed that objectivity in History is impossible in any case and so her story is as good as any. Historians as a academic class appear to be smiling and nodding, or, at most, argue that this is a valuable contribution to the national conversation and the real problem is pushback from legislators.
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Her project appears to have been accepted as history by large portions (supermajorities?) of the broader Academy itself, together with most of the rest of the knowledge-production apparatus outside academia proper, and through these channels has also been accepted by large portions of the public. It was subsequently converted into educational materials specifically for teaching history at all levels of education from grade school to University, and for this purpose was in fact adopted as formal curricula many teachers across many schools, and has doubtless heavily influenced the curricula and teaching of many, many more. It continues, to this day, to be generally considered a valid resource for teaching history, even at the university level.
...Given the above, how is the 1619 product not an output of History as an academic discipline, by which that discipline should be judged?
More generally, what is the purpose of History as a formal, credentialed, taxpayer-funded, status-laden academic discipline and sociocultural organ, in your view? What is the point of it, why is it valuable? There are always going to be autists digging for information about the past, synthesizing it down into coherence, and then encapsulating it for transmission in a narrative. I'm one of them, in my own modest way. Why is it necessary that this system in particular continue on?
My understanding once was that Historians generated a consensus understanding of the world we live in and how that world came to be, while simultaneously keeping that consensus as honest as possible by puncturing its self-delusions. I am quite convinced that the current system is incapable of performing such a function, as I believe examples like the 1619 project demonstrate.
Another argument might be that the system generates significant amounts of true knowledge, and that even if that true knowledge is shouted down and buried in the present, it is still possible to dig it up later and use it for the betterment of all. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the harm the system enables in the present and has enabled in the observable past, significantly outweighs any plausible potential benefit in the future. True knowledge can and will be generated outside the present system, and the scale of the harms appear to me to demand immediate redress.
Or perhaps the present system is about the process, not the observed ends. The important thing is to generate and maintain this lively, interesting, collegial intellectual ferment, where smart people get together and bounce zany ideas off each other, and we fund this in the hope that they'll hit on some bizarre, out-of-the-box idea that's super useful, something we'd never find by looking for it in a rational, systematic, spreadsheets-and-time-cards approach. And if this is the argument... You concede bias, but I do not think the term "bias" adequately encapsulates the scope of the problem.
Since the late 1980s, book after book has assailed the lack of viewpoint diversity and power of political correctness on campus. But in the ensuing decades, these problems have only worsened. Universities are now in a feedback loop in which a political monoculture creates a hostile climate for conservatives, driving self-censorship and empowering cancel culture, which keeps conservatives out.
And so on, and on. It is routine for Academics of all disciplines to call for ideological purging of people like me from the academy. It is routine for academics to express support for discrimination and exclusion of people like me from the academy, whether in polls or in their own public advocacy. I do not believe it is possible for my views or my values to receive a fair hearing in any part of the existing academic system. I do not believe it is practical for members of my tribe to attempt to join that system in hopes of reforming it from within. I do not believe that the system can be meaningfully reformed in any eventuality; Academics, collectively, have built the environment they wish to have and fully intend to maintain it, at any cost, while burning vast resources and generating considerable harms. The solution is not to ask them kindly to please not, nor to generate ineffectual mandates in the face of limitless resistance and bottomless malicious compliance.
The job we gave Academia was one of great import. They willingly accepted a sacred duty, and in my view they have willingly betrayed that duty about as thoroughly as it could possibly be betrayed. One of the patterns I've noticed in Moderate thinking is the ability to recognize that if bad choices are made, negative consequences are likely to result, but then when the bad choice is in fact made, to argue that the negative consequences they themselves predicted should nonetheless be restrained. My unwillingness to engage in such behavior is, I think, one of the things that marks me as an extremist. There have been no shortage of warnings to the Academy that if they continued to convert their system into a partisan war-engine for their tribe, the system itself would be in peril. They continued. I think it is time to actualize the peril. If you disagree, I'd be particularly interested in whether you disagree over where to draw the line beyond which the system must be dismantled, or if you disagree that there is such a line at all.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
The key insight here is that sufficiently inconsistent "rule of law" is no longer rule of law. "I would prefer rule of law. Let me know when it's available again."
See the expansion above.
...I think I should probably generate fewer open-ended grievance rants. I guess there's the question of my personal experience and interaction, and then there's the question of general observable data. Put another way, are they good at teaching, and are they good for society?
Personal experience is a big part of it: I've been taught, and I've observed those close to me being taught, and I've worked at low levels in the system helping teach, and I've taught on my own outside the system. I've worked as a professional artist for near two decades now and was a struggling artist trying to break in for a half-decade before that, and that whole time I've been trying to learn as much as possible. To reiterate the edit above, I would never suggest that anyone I care about pay money to a university to teach them to be an artist, any more than I would recommend that someone I care about join a multi-level marketing scheme or invest in NFTs. The mismatch between value burned to value received is just too wide, even without accounting for the ideological contamination. This is the part of academia I know the most about, and I think maximalist-negative assessments of this area are entirely warranted.
Second-hand experience is also a part of it: I have professional academics in my immediate family who I'm close to, who are wholly committed to the current system, from which I can gain insight into a contrary perspective. I know they are good people who have dedicated their lives to excellence in their profession, who care deeply about doing a good job, who believe deeply that they are fighting the good fight, who have likewise spent decades straining to learn and improve, to do a good job. The stories they tell me and the answers they give to the questions I ask about how that fight is going are not encouraging.
Observation is a very big part of it.
Student loan debt is somewhere around two trillion dollars, and student loan forgiveness is a live political issue. The strongest argument for the existing system, by a very wide margin, was that it generated prosperity by equipping its students for success in the modern economy. That justification is incompatible with the apparent necessity of writing off all the student loans we shoveled into the pockets of those institutions. We can observe that their costs have spiraled without apparent end. We can observe that their capacity to achieve the goals that justified those costs appear to be chronically declining. They are very bad and very arguably getting worse at the jobs we pay them to do. But on the other hand, they are fantastically good at generating vast pools of toxic ideology which they then pump directly into our society's memeplex, with disastrous consequences for everyone.
You mention history: the most significant output of historical academia in the last decade or so that I'm aware of is the 1619 project. I think this is a very bad output that has made the world a significantly worse place in ways that can be directly measured by counting specific dead humans. A runner-up would be the supposed child graves "discovered" in Kamloops. My assessment of other outputs from the field leads me to conclude that this is probably a reasonably representative example of what we should expect from the field, and indeed from most fields generally. It seems to me that a large portion of every dollar Academia receives is going to go to generating more of this, and things like this, and things even worse than this. There are a lot of other examples, spread very widely over academia as a whole. I never got around to writing a post about the academic lady, prestigiously positioned at a prestigious university in charge of a grant worth the better part of a million dollars, discussing in a publicly-posted interview how important it was to not report abuse of black children by their families to the authorities.
There's more. There's so, so much more.
Poetry and history can certainly have real value and legitimate research. I am not confident that academia is outputting any appreciable quantity of real value and legitimate research on these subjects, relative to the value it consumes to "study" them. Then again, Poetry and History are not my direct area of expertise.
I am an artist. I am very interested in encouraging my kids and their numerous cousins and young people I encounter generally to pursue art as a skill and even potentially a career, because I find it very rewarding and think they might as well. I would never, ever encourage them to engage with the academic art world in any way, and will actively discourage them from "studying" art at conventional educational institutions, and certainly not to pay those institutions to teach them how to be an artist. My personal experience with those institutions was woeful, and I've seen no evidence since that my experience does not generalize.
And yet, Obama didn't massacre the bundy standoff, and Biden backed down rather than fight Abbott over Texas border enforcement, and Rittenhouse survived and was acquitted. The media's ability to dictate social consensus has declined sharply; Trump was re-elected.
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