RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9hr ago
Pretty cool. The faces in the cathedral were a bit lame though. A certain lack of craftsmanship in an otherwise excellent composition.
I don't really like Fable 5.2 that much personality-wise but it sure is smart. It did a lot better with a highly specific question than Opus 5.5.
RandomRanger
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11hr ago
In the 'motte needs you to review' I can no longer see the context of a given post up for review, nor whose it is, that whole bottom bar.
RandomRanger
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12hr ago
Heretics seem to be the primary danger to the Imperium. The Tyranids and other xenos didn't do nearly so much damage as the Black Crusades did, opening up a giant rift in the galaxy, cutting the Imperium in two. In previous Black Crusades the Imperium had to drop everything and head off to Cadia to avoid disaster.
It's not just rebellion but subversion in support of Chaos and their armies, often synchronized into a coordinated plan that is the issue. Chaos is the primary danger, so I would favour Hereticus, Malleus Demonhunters and then Xenos.
RandomRanger
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13hr ago
Consider those migrant truck drivers who can't read the road signs and crash into people. They manage up to a point...
I'd be terrified of driving a huge truck in a foreign country whose road rules I don't understand and whose signs I can't read. But clearly they're not, or don't foresee the issues that might come up or they're forced into it perhaps.
There are probably many more similar cases in other industry, food contaminations in agriculture. Whole countries seem to manage with 80-90 IQ, not great but they do manage.
RandomRanger
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14hr ago
How can we possibly understand the chances of extra-terrestrial life when we haven't gone out to look for it?
Everyone seems to assume their presence would be obvious to us in the form of visual emissions, Dyson swarms being built. But we don't know what that looks like and cannot really tell a dyson swarm from ordinary interstellar dust that covers a star. We cannot go interstellar to actually check what's happening even a few star systems away, never mind the whole galaxy or observable universe.
There's no way to predict what advanced methods and principles a powerful civilization has access to. Spin up a supercomputer the size of the moon, a particle accelerator that goes all the way around the solar system, run them for a thousand years - I think there would be some major physics advances. Maybe the aliens aren't interested in Dyson Spheres and are doing things with 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' instead. The latter are significantly more important than all the matter we have any understanding of.
It's far too early to estimate the chances of alien civilizations.
You can't plan on reliably detecting an entity much more powerful than you, who you've never knowingly encountered before and have no idea at all what it looks like, purely by looking at 2% of the possible habitat via telescopes with such poor resolution that they struggle to even find planets past a certain range, let alone discerning much about them. And even our knowledge of the planets is very weak. Only certain young, massive exoplanets are obvious to us, we can crudely guess the chemical composition of some nearby gas giants. No hypothesis can rest upon such weak investigative ability.
https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/
An exoplanet is any planet beyond our solar system. Most of them orbit other stars, but some free-floating exoplanets, called rogue planets, are untethered to any star. We’ve confirmed more than 6,000 exoplanets, out of the billions that we believe exist.
We've found about one in a million planets we expect to exist!
RandomRanger
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1d ago
Muting is really good for this? Or not interested.
There is a perverse tendency where I get ragebaited into making a snarky reply and so the algorithm shows me more terrible takes. But muting or not-interesting is a strong countermeasure.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
State legitimacy should be looked at more concretely.
Firstly, there's the internal element. The essence of Japan can be the Yamato warrior, One Hundred Million With One Spirit - or it can be something else, isolation and moralism. Democratic moralism is just one kind of ideal that upholds state legitimacy. It could also be revolutionary Maoism or Rome's destiny to rule the world or the divine right of a dynasty to rule many peoples. It could be about being sorry for racism against black people, that could be the essence of a state. These ideas aren't just abstract, they guide how the nation and state sees itself and how the state behaves on the ground. What does the army do, who makes up the elite class, how is the government run, who is taxed and who gets sinecures? These are all contested (someone gains and someone loses) and need legitimacy/ideology behind them to explain and justify. The whole purpose of legitimacy is to legitimize some concrete action.
And there's the external element, the delegitimizing factor. The Iranian regime is illegitimate because they impoverish their own people to make missiles and fund terrorism. (When the Arabs do that, they're called proxies rather than terrorists until they go rogue). All non-democracies are illegitimate to a certain extent and even some of the democracies can be 'backsliding.' It's a way of viewing the world that has material results in that they end up getting attacked, usually by the US. The West is illegitimate because they're satanic degenerates who don't know the difference between men and women and so opposing them is justified despite the costs... The true reason might be something else but delegitimizing helps justify some kind of action.
I think it's always better to ground discussions like this in what's actually happening on the ground, or a hypothetical example.
Are you saying that there should be a eugenic state founded on Mars? Well OK but it seems a bit impractical. Mars is a long way away.
RandomRanger
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3d ago
If you want to argue that a particular act of evil or suffering is gratuitous in the moment, how are you in any position to judge the absence of a morally sufficient reason that permits of the possibility that doesn’t produce future beneficial consequences later on? You can’t, and neither can I.
I don't need to be literally omniscient to judge that birth defects are a bad thing with confidence. If there are any future benefits of a disaster, there could also be benefits without the disaster. Or more benefits lost because of the disaster, which is a much more natural conclusion considering the nature of disaster.
By the very same logic you could conclude that God is infinitely evil and all the good things in the world are just ways to bring about later evil in ways you can't see or comprehend. And then crow that I can't logically disprove that. But it's just made-up nonsense.
Yes, you could still argue if you wanted why floods can’t just be eliminated entirely or why carcinogens have to exist at all, but there’s no logical argument that demands or requires that as a conclusion.
Yes, my theology is that God is not omnibenevolent and that Christianity is false. You're the one trying to defend omnibenevolence!
- Is God omnibenevolent and omnipotent per scripture and teachings?
- No because if God was omnibenevolent and omnipotent, we would see X, Y and Z that we don't see
- WTF, there's no logical argument that requires that conclusion, you can't know that infant getting some horrific disease isn't good in the long run, this is just about your theology of what you think God should or should not do (which is somehow separate from omnibenevolence?) and also natural evils are a compound of what humans do sometimes...
Nuking Israel is a bad idea. An angry super-hysterical Israel lashing out blindly is not a good thing.
Why not just strike back in the same way? Get rid of the Epstein class via counterintelligence/elite censure and run America for American interests. That's a prerequisite to nuking Israel anyway, so you get 100% of the gains at 0.03% of the cost.
George Soros is on team 'chaotic evil' not team Israel. There's not a monolithic conspiracy here, there are a bunch of anti-Israel Jews who want to break down all national distinction, including Israel's. Noel Ignatiev for instance:
Ignatiev's web site and publication Race Traitor displayed the motto "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity".
In 2008, the American Jewish Committee objected to an encyclopedia article on Zionism that Ignatiev wrote for The Encyclopedia of Race and Racism.[19] In the article, Ignatiev described Israel as a "racial state, where rights are assigned on the basis of ascribed descent or the approval of the superior race" and likened it to Nazi Germany and the Southern United States before the civil rights movement.
Nuclear wars should be fought with nuclear weapons, espionage/cultural/elite conflicts should not be fought with nuclear weapons! If the Israelis have pre-placed nukes somewhere in major cities, then that's a really serious problem indicative of a nuclear war and perhaps worthy of a disarming strike. Epstein and blackmail/subversion is not.
RandomRanger
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3d ago
I don’t like the answers because they're dumb. It doesn't even remotely meet the minimum standards of reasoning.
'Free will'
No. Free will does not require people to be born with crippling illnesses or obliterated by natural disasters, quite the opposite. Duh. There are countless impositions on free will as forced by natural constraints.
Superhero movies are low-status
OK...
There's a grand plan that explains all of this but it can't be explained to you (notably in contradiction of omnipotence, God should be able to explain that plan and have it actually hold up)
Well I also have a grand and secret reason that shows I'm right but it can't be explained to you...
anything available to you always has the opportunity to be misused
No it doesn't. That's a supreme law of the universe beyond God's omnipotence? No, obviously not.
You're appealing to all these theodicies. But theodicies are cope devised by people trying to defend a position they didn't arrive at through means of reason. And whether they do it by making up words or sneering at low-status or just not considering counterarguments for even 5 minutes... it doesn't really matter.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'll repeat this more simply.
Merely removing hernias or dementia would not make it impossible to be virtuous. You could still be virtuous if dementia didn't/couldn't exist. Virtue is not reliant upon external difficulties (many of which are beyond our ability to manage as yet).
How can you have charity if there's nobody in distress to help?
The outlook you're expressing is bizarre and anti-human too, as if the good part about virtue is not that it's helping people but that it's good in and of itself. You'd prefer a world that needs charity to one that doesn't? It's only a short step from there to chopping off baby's limbs so they make for better beggars (and allow the opportunity for alms-giving). That's what your God does de facto and it's incredible to see this principle defended albeit indirectly. He establishes a system where birth defects leave people crippled for a short and painful life... so we can be charitable to them? This is a mockery of ethics. Just have birth defects not happen!
would guess it's because you want to persist in some kind of sin that God condemns
Yeah, like having a non-deranged system of ethics. If Christians actually literally believed the ethos you're laying out and took it to its conclusions seriously, it would be a cult of unimaginable cruelty. Fortunately they don't.
RandomRanger
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4d ago
anything available to you always has the opportunity to be misused
Why should that be? Why can't my skin be so tough that fire can't burn it, why can't I breathe water or liquid nitrogen as well as air? There's nothing impossible about those things in principle from the point of view of a deity constructing the universe. It could be that if captured by villains and if we were in dire straits instead of getting tortured to death or enslaved we could release the soul from the body, fly away and reform freely elsewhere. Or instead of having hernias and gout, those things just wouldn't exist like zombies or ghouls. Or nobody would even be villainous, they'd be by nature against it. Or it would be impossible to steal, people having an inventory like a video game.
None of these changes necessitates making people mindless automatons. The free will argument is cope. Life isn't more meaningful just because it's fragile, the good qualities of life are impaired and reduced by fragility. Zombies and ghouls aren't needed for the good life, just like mosquitoes or cholera or cluster migraines.
The fundamental patterns of the universe are set up so that fire does burn the skin, where drinking liquid nitrogen inflicts an agonizing death, only fish can breathe water and our minds are tied to our bodies - unless we become powerful enough in complicated mathematics to alter these facts on the ground.
there’s nothing logically incoherent about God having morally sufficient reasons for permitting the existence of evil in the world
Sure, if those reasons exist. But we can't find them. It's a pretty sticky wicket to rest one's defence on ideas that can't be found or explained. I'd look askance at my lawyer if his defence of me was 'well there's actually a really good reason why RandomRanger is not guilty but I can't tell you and it's probably so mysterious we could never understand it but it is logically possible for such a reason to exist. Or at least nobody has proven it can't exist.'
The simpler explanation is better.
RandomRanger
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4d ago
“Sin” is a function of disordered desire
Omnipotence disappears the moment it's called upon. Why can desire be disordered? Why can humans turn away from God? Why is the physical world corrupted at all? Why was there a tree of knowledge in the garden? Why make things and then forbid them?
Efforts to answer these questions presume the precepts of the faith and build up these huge abstract epicycles. Humans have to be able to turn away from God since that's obvious and we see it happening and so God, being omnipotent has to have allowed that to happen and it's somehow part of the plan or needed for free choice... But the other ways that our choices are limited by the structure of the universe are somehow not this grave restriction on free will. God is a lot more opposed to negentropy than sin, the former seems actually forbidden. The latter could be too but isn't. Maybe that's part of the mysterious plan we cannot understand, the catch-all defence.
The scripture, Aquinas and theodicy is written around this gulf between the grand claims of omnipotence and omnibenevolence and the meagre realities. It doesn't explain anything, Epicurean argument alone obliterates all of it. And so you say 'oh this is very basic stuff, we've dealt with the Epicurean argument' but you haven't and cannot without coming up with these question-begging excuses like disordered desire.
Whereas the blind watchmaker needs no excuses. Take away the omnibenevolence and everything falls into place.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Let's assume that God wants to instill virtue in people. Should he: a) create a world with challenges and suffering or b) create a world with no challenge and no suffering?
An omnipotent God can directly create virtuous people and/or seed virtue into the universe at a base level. The universe could literally work on vibes-based storybook logic where the virtuous always prevail regardless of whatever challenges or suffering they may face. That is no more or less reasonable than having the universe run on atoms or gravity. Virtue is independent of challenge or suffering.
If he wanted no virtue, he could make the physics and incentives revolve around pure self-interest, maybe one has to eat the souls of others to survive. We don't live in that world.
If he wanted maximum virtue, he could have virtue directly translate into success and power and prestige, directly performing miracles in public. The medievals thought that could happen, they thought that kings could cure scrofula with the royal touch. We don't live in that world either.
God would certainly not resort to such indirect and ineffectual methods as getting people to write and constantly reinterpret holy books if he wanted virtue. There are much more direct levers to push.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Kudos, I think we probably don't do enough of this. I certainly don't.
Obviously, Iran is very unpopular. I still accept Trump's judgment that it was the right thing to do and I still believe that the war is (plainly) a military success. (Call me crazy!)
Why not look at it holistically? What good is military success if it can't enable a good political outcome?
Take Afghanistan for instance. The US took most of the country off the Taliban in a few months, installed a new government. They won every battle. But if the military success doesn't translate into political success, then it's not useful.
Consider this thread for instance, it's very long but skimmable: https://x.com/cryptochondrion/status/1433917591651770375
War is about politics. They're inseparably linked, like the engines and the aircraft. A good plane without engines is hardly an aircraft. For all of the US's strength in achieving military victories, there's a serious weakness in the political arm, performing hard imperialism.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
I did go have a look at the man you linked, I find it unsurprising that a Christian scholar believes in miracles. I could find a bunch of imams who believe and write about djinn. Let's see them use djinn in warfare. Let's see them act like they're truly real.
- God introduces cancer, disasters, diseases, mortality into the world (while being omnipotent and having the power to directly control the space of all possible outcomes)
- God occasionally cures them or provides some intangible and unclear assistance at an almost imperceptibly low rate, far inferior to what modern technology can achieve
- Everyone celebrates??
You should never even need to claim miracles. If God doesn't want something to happen, it would not be possible. Why introduce fornication to the world and then forbit it? Why have sodomy be a thing at all? Why have greed at all? There is no grand cosmic reason for men to derive sexual pleasure from buggery, nor for the human back to be weak compared to the weight of our heads and so get back pain.
By the way, you can use the Bible to argue for anything, there's so much contradictory or unclear writing in there that it can be interpreted in any direction:
Do not put the Lord your God to the test.
RandomRanger
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5d ago
There wasn't even a scapegoat for COVID and millions of people died. Nor the GFC.
Kareem Serageldin, a Credit Suisse trading executive, got 30 months in 2013. He was a mid-level figure, not a CEO.
Maybe if a swarm does something really dangerous? But it'd have to be a pretty big event.
RandomRanger
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5d ago
Christian theology is forced to take up this incredible burden of justifying how the structure of the universe necessitates all these problems from cancer to bad equilibriums, so they bring in original sin or free will or other constructs. But there is no need for them in the first place.
Free will or the ineffable divine plan means that sometimes Christians get massacred, forcibly converted, enslaved by their enemies - despite a perfectly loving and omnipotent deity on their side. He helps in intangible, non-obvious ways for some reason, or in the afterlife where the outcomes can't be observed.
Vs
I look around and I see no evidence of omnibenevolence in this universe, so its creator is not omnibenevolent.
The simpler solution is better. It doesn't need to invent dogmatic justifications for what's going on. How are we to know that God's plans require his followers to be immolated in Lisbon? Blind faith. And the good things that happen? These miracles are actually good? They aren't some counterintuitive damnation to bring about more evil in the long run (since we're taking on this twisty reasoning process)? Again blind faith. It's not even consistent.
Theology is cope, it's a way to find some justification for the unjustifiable, baffling people with jargon when the case is very simple. Take Leibniz's 'best of all possible worlds' - that's real theology done by real theologians. It's obviously wrong. Any idiot could easily make a better world just by subtracting mosquitoes or cluster migraines, or some similar unpleasant aspect of the world.
But theologians erect these huge bulwarks of defence against thinking clearly, they maintain that you can't judge God's action or inaction since you don't know what he's planning. Yet they seem to be very sure about omnibenevolence and love... How do they know what he's like? Because they appeal to the legitimacy of one holy book amongst many about events that happened in the distant past, when supernatural events happened constantly.
It's galactic-scale motivated reasoning, like anthropology or social sciences but without even pretending to be falsifiable, since they deny the very idea of testing their work.
RandomRanger
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5d ago
Sure that's all true but the progressive ideas are really dumb and don't work.
In Britain or Australia or the EU (or California in the US) sensible moderate, well-educated, expert-informed policies are implemented consistently with full cooperation from the bureaucracy and NGOs... and they don't work. They don't deliver safety or per-capita economic growth or technology or military power, they retard development and consequently retard political stability. Papering over the cracks by weaponizing the legal system or using migration to drown out electoral opposition doesn't address the underlying issue, it won't make the system actually performant. Can't blame Russian bots, disinformation, social media for their own incompetence forever.
All the AI/tech wealth in California can't enable them to build a mildly modern rail network. The money goes to lawyers, environmental groups... Britain pays to give land to Mauritius. Maybe the lawyers are getting kickbacks.
All this diversity is extremely expensive! The Danish and Dutch analyses prove it in pure tax terms, before even bringing in crime and terrorism. It's a cost without benefit, save electoral impacts. The Quality Learing Centre is not a good long-term investment.
No matter how many rain dances the tribesmen do it won't do anything to actually bring rain. No matter how much DEI is done (and they do a hell of a lot of DEI in South Africa) they can't actually achieve equality or equity. Partly that's because it's about making sinecures but partly it's because the very structural assumptions and ideas are wrong.
So it's true that against the power of the assembled institutions and elite groupthink and acculturation, the right is outmatched. It is easier to bring people in than get rid of them in the present system. The left can afford to make more errors than the right and still advance their agenda. The left can do lots and lots of wrecking and squander countless trillions.
But how long can the assembled institutions last when they're up against the underlying nature of reality?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Can we stop using SI now? Superintelligence already had a distinct meaning.
AI will be fine. The Democrats aren't going to go directly up against Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Nvidia... about half the stock market. They're not going to risk letting China catch up. Plus the military and intelligence agencies are very interested in AI superiority for its speed, targeting, information-processing/surveillance and mathematical capabilities with reference to cryptography, not to mention cyberespionage. They're hardly likely to welcome a slowdown.
Lots of things are unpopular but they happen anyway. Trump I promised to pull out troops from the Middle East but generals largely ignored him and cajoled him into doing what they wanted. Trump II jacked up huge tariffs, the markets revolted and he backed down from the extremes. He's still president until 2029 and will likely veto any anti-AI bills. There are ways to get around uncooperative planning environments for datacentres, Elon's pretty good at that. Or just bribing people.
The Iraq War became very unpopular but the US was still stuck in there due to sunk cost fallacy, the cost to prestige, the forces of chaos and destruction that were released by the destruction of Baathism sucked America back in.
Bernie's 'ban superintelligence' bill probably won't get through even with the new senators, unless there's a major crisis and by that time it might well be too late to matter. Even if it was passed into law it probably wouldn't work like it's supposed to, regulation of big tech isn't easy.
RandomRanger
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5d ago
More tariffs on China and maybe the EU, yes. But tariffs on everyone including allies, jacked up so high and so fast? No. I remember April and the stock market just imploding.
Weren't you surprised to see that when it happened?
RandomRanger
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5d ago
Once we take that seriously though, shouldn't an urgent cause be raising child mortality? Gotta get those kids dying of diseases before they can sin, pump out more kids too, be just so reckless as to not be actually murdering them... But Jesus also went around curing the sick. So what's going on here? Is children dying good or bad?
Real Christians naturally wouldn't fall into this kind of gotcha. The values and outcomes are mostly fine but they rest on a weak foundation. There are arguments assembled like epicycles to prevent and evade these kinds of inconsistencies including the general-purpose 'you can't understand God's plan, just trust that he knows what he's doing and has your best interests at heart'. Whereas if we abandon the all-loving omnipotent everything falls into place smoothly. Children dying is bad in an uncomplicated way. They're lost forever. Sometimes natural disasters wreck you in an impersonal, mechanical world. They need to be worked around via warning and sturdy buildings. If you pass the test (however wildly difficult and unfair it may be), you live. If you fail, you get wrecked and die.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
We are responsible for our own steak, if we want to stay here.
Yes, this angle is much more reasonable. Full responsibility.
RandomRanger
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6d ago
He's a regulations-hater and Trump also has a strong deregulation agenda. On twitter he kept bringing up how the regulators made him drag up sea creatures and put headphones on them to see if they were distressed by the noise of the rockets, he thought that was absurd.
Also he has a feud with California regarding the general Dem anti-billionaire sentiment.
I don't think it was predictable that Trump was going to go crazy with tariffs and Iran. Nobody expected tariffs, markets least of all, Musk fell out with Trump severely over that (now forgotten).
OK I had no idea how many there were... There was one where it was this apartment building that had a huge cathedral in it (or some kind of bigger on the inside trickery), a tonne of people at a dance and the faces were all just faceless sub-PS1 blurs of colour. That was disappointing.
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