ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
9hr ago
No, but please document your progress if you take it up, and post hints yourself. It's one of the hobbies I was considering myself.
The people with power are mostly white. Ergo white people DO have that ability. Not necessarily ALL white people (though see below). If a subset of white people is the problem, then that is an intra-racial issue.
Nope, just because the people in power are white does not mean "white people generally have the power of enabling that to happen". The statement is insanely racist and would not be allowed for any other group.
No one understood your statement to mean "ALL white people", so I don't know what's the point of that part of the response.
If white voters in the US REALLY wanted to limit immigration above all else they do actually have the power to do so. They just have to repeatedly vote for the people who want to do so
The fact that we didn't have to have the supermajority of white people repeatedly vote for unlimited immigration (I'd say "even when the economy is good", but the connection of immigration and a good economy is essentially made up, or the causality is outright reversed), clearly shows that someone has more power than "white people generally".
That's without mentioning the fact that there's absolutely no evidence that repeatedly voting this way would actually achieve the goal.
he point isn't that you tolerate fraud as in not police it, it's that you police it but you don't turn panopticon to go from 10 cases of fraud across the whole population to zero.
I don't know if this is quite right. It's not that high-trust societies police fraud just as intensely as low-trust ones, but decide not to got the final mile. They actually police fraud much less than low-trust ones, take people at their word and generally assume their good faith. This is kind of the definition of a high-trust society, and it's also been matched by my experience visiting them.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10hr ago
However as time went on i largely gave up trying to discuss AI with people outside the industry as it became increasingly apparent to me that most rationalists were more interested in the use of AI as a conceptual vehicle to push thier particular brand of Silicon Valley woo
Well, I for one wish you hadn't given up, as I have the same impression, but it's only an impression. Would be interesting seing it backed by expertise.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
18hr ago
Oh look, he already deleted his post.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
19hr ago
At which point I pointed out that only white people generally have the power of enabling that to happen, so the issue is not with Indians or Mexicans and so forth
But white people don't have the power to enable it (his point about them voting against it proves that). If you want to say it's not really the Indians' or Mexicans' fault I more or less agree, but I don't see how you can make that claim with resorting to advanced racism.
It was more than that, but not much more (...) and the right's reaction had all the hallmarks of a moral panic
Several European countries passed gender self-ID laws, last year the town hall where I live was draped in "TRANS DAY OF REMEMBRANCE" banners, the whole "Gender Affirming Care" thing is a fiasco based on no evidence, and a failure of scientific institutions to do proper filtering, there's people being harassed by the police or outright arrested for not buying the gender ideology, or for mild jokes... Yes please go on and tell me how these things are indicative of a moral panic. I guess it's completely normal for sweeping reforms in accordance with a specific ideology to take place, when the influence of said ideology is nothing but a moral panic.
And at the national level, this rhetoric was soundly rejected within the Democratic party.
No it hasn't. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, probably not even you, has ever rejected it. What happened is that Democrats noticed that it's losing them the election, so they're trying to turn the volume down, but they did absolutely nothing to reject it.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
19hr ago
and not knowing this poster's alleged prior history
There's your problem.
On top of what cjet says dude always nukes his posts and account after people figure out it's him. The behavior is all the more bizarre, since, as you say what he posts isn't really objectionable, if he just gave the whole "hiding your power level" shtick a rest.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
20hr ago
Not much to expand on, the race of the people making the decisions is irrelevant to what you're discussing. What were you even trying to point out by mentioning it?
What I'm really arguing (and what I take Davies to be arguing) is that fraud can only take place within a high-trust community. That is, a country might be low-trust on the whole, but there might be enclaves within that country in which the members enjoy a presumption of trust with one another (social clubs, religious communities, voluntary organisations etc.). It is within these communities in which fraud and scams will occur in countries which are otherwise low-trust.
I don't think we're talking past each other, I just disagree with yours / Davies' core thesis. No, that's not how it works at all. There are scams and frauds in Russia, and there are essentially no high-trust communities there. All that happens is that scammers have to come up with new tricks that other people haven't heard of yet, and so don't know to be on the lookout for.
A community that doesn't lock it's doors is high-trust. If they get burgled, and start locking up it makes them low(er) trust. A burglar learning how to pick locks does not magically make the community high(er)-trust.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
21hr ago
Right, but those politicians are white themselves overwhelmingly right? 75% of Congress is white.
None of that proves "the call is coming from inside the house", unless you're one of the more advanced racists.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
21hr ago
Hold up.
For years, on this very forum (well, fine, you have to come buck to the /r/SSC days), whenever someone pointed out the advances of the SJ movement, the response was something to the effect of "it's just a couple of crazy kids on college campuses / Tumblr", or alternatively there'd be an attempt to "steelman" the movement to make it look more reasonable than it actually is ("defund the police doesn't really mean defund the police"), something later dubbed "sanewashing" by other elements of the left.
His use of neutral language is not covering up any switch, it's taking what progressives who participated in Culture War commentary at face value, i.e. assuming their good faith. We can dispense with that assumption, but I'm not sure you'd be happy with that either.
Of course not - you'd assume they were a scam artist trying to rip you off. The only place someone would take them up on the offer is in an environment in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy, which in turn means the only place a scam artist would attempt it is in an environment in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy: in other words, fraud is impossible in a low-trust society.
This is completely false. It doesn't surprise me, as westerners don't really grok low-trust societies, even the ones that acknowledge their existence (because hilariously there's quite a few who think doing so is racist).
What you're saying is the equivalent of believing that a predator can only successfully hunt if you transfer him it to Quokka Island. Quokka Island will appear to one as an all-you-can-eat buffet, but It's obvious predators survive and thrive quite well in environments where the prey is adapted to it's existence, it's just that they're subject to "you win some, you lose some" dynamics. In the case of scams, all it means is that they have to put more effort into appearances of legitimacy. To someone from a low-trust society, a high-trust one does not appear as "the only place where fraud is possible", it appears as one where the population hasn't bothered to put up the most basic defenses.
None of this even seems counterintuitive to me, it just seems like basic economics.
The part that's counter-intuitive, and perhaps deceptive, is where you/he claims that tolerating fraud is the price for a high-trust society. No amount of tolerance will turn a low-trust society into a high-trust one. What needs to happen is the purging scammers, once that's done, people lower their guard naturally. They don't "tolerate" fraud, it just happens so rarely, it hardly ever enters their thoughts.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Fraud is only possible in a society in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy
This hasn't been my experience coming from a low-trust society, where everyone quickly learns to keep their hand on their wallet, and grow extra eyes all around their head.
Montreal was for years known as the scam capital of the world, specifically because the number of trusting investors eager to invest in promising new startups made it catnip for scam artists.
Did this happen, by any chance, because there was very little fraud in Montreal in years prior, and people were much less cautious with their money because their priors about trustworthiness were outdated? Did they start being more cautious about fraud specifically after it turned out that the expected cost of preempting fraud is lower than the expected cost of falling victim to it?
The book is not counter-intuitive. It's wrong. At best it's doing the old gimmick of phrasing something true in a deliberately counter-intuitive way, to make it's reader feel smart, but the way you're describing it, it sounds just plain wrong.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
I disagree. I think the book presents a convincing case that, impossible utopias excepted, a world with no fraud would be worse than a world with some amount of fraud. Some amount of fraud is the price you pay for living in a high-trust society (and all the economic and social benefits that entails); a few iatrogenic deaths is the price you pay for a national healthcare system; a few murders is the price you pay for living in a free society etc.
I think this is backwards. No one pays with fraud or murder to create a higj-trust / free society. A high-trust / free society comes about when the amount of fraud and deaths is so low, they're not worth bothering with to preempt.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
In light of this, I find myself wondering if a lot of new shows are as bad as they seem, or if I'm simply unable to overlook their flaws (or inadvertently comparing them to the best-in-genera alternatives)
Nah. A well-written show leaves you something else to mull over as your grow older. Maybe there's more depth to a character than you could even begin to understand when you were young (imagine thinking Boromir is just an asshole... couldn't be me!), or it touches on some abstract ideas you couldn't grasp earlier. Sure, I could flip the table over TNG's retarded security protocols that get broken regularly, and I probably would, if there was nothing else to redeem the show.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
And you don't think the chain of assumption that results in a liberaltarian state being naturally diverse, and a libertarian state being locked into racism, is a tad convenient for you? If a libertarian says "I don't think bigger states are naturally more prone to diversity than small ones", how is his explanation worse than yours?
Huh? France and the Benelux states had already been democracies for a long time before WW2, and France was already a republic to boot.
Sorry, I phrased it poorly. "the way the term is being used nowadays" is carrying some weight in that statement, as that way involves ideas like "you're doing democracy wrong if you vote in the way we disapprove of".
Spain and Portugal joined NATO only after those dictatorships fell, which I think bears mentioning here.
The US had military bases in Spain with Franco still in power. Admittedly, I know less about Portugal.
The Baltics used to be ruled by German/Germanized nobles for a long time and thus have a shared legacy of Western orientation; that much is certainly relevant in this case.
Southkraut allready summed up what I think about the German democracy, but aside from that, If it worked like that, and if Poland's tradition was relevant (more on that later), Belarus should have been one of the better democratized nations.
The Poles have a bygone but long and cherished legacy of being a republic with a parliament which, for example
Similarly to what German democracy looked like in practice, Poland was an "elite state" through and through. The nobles may have organized themselves as a democracy, but they'd scoff idea of having the society ran as anything other than a class based hierarchy. There's a throwaway line in Game of Thrones where Sandor Clegane says it makes as much sense to give the vote to his horse as much as does to give it to a peasant, and given their affinity for horses, it honestly wouldn't surprise me if the line was first spoken in Poland.
Sure they have a democratic legacy that is both cherished and long, with the caveat that the part that's long isn't particularly cherished - they literally see it as the proximate cause of the collapse of their empire - and that part that is cherished - a last ditch attempt at reforming their system - lasted all 4 years.
It could have probably worked but nobody even tried.
Like I said, I don't necessarily disagree, but it's hard for me to tell what the world would look like if things panned out differently. Is a Germany where Eastern ideas were taken seriously one where Easterners don't vote AfD because their ideas don't resonate, or because AfD-ish / BSW-ish ideas are already incorporated into the mainstream?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
I suppose humans are more fundamentally hierarchical than they are tribalist/racist.
As long as the person or people on the top stand to benefit from greater numbers of workers, and they don't personally suffer negative effects from things like immigration and ethnic diversity it is in their interest to encourage it. They command the people below them, who are also made better off in a number of ways from the increased number of workers, and on down through the system.
Okay, but the question you originally asked was:
I'm a little unclear on how a libertarian watchman state where all of the government enforcers are racist/sectarian/whatever, ever stops being bigoted.
So isn't the direct analogy here the people on the top being more racist, and therefore commanding the people below them to be more racist? If the dynamics of diversity and rational self-interest naturally result in people on the top imposing non-racism on the bottom, how does the nightwatchman state end up with government enforcers being racist/sectarian/whatever?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Because, I don't think most traditional libertarians support the "men with guns forcing people not to act racist" part of the equation, and I think that is a central part of how the idealized form of modern American politics actually works in practice.
But in your system, if society is racist top to bottom, how are you getting "men with guns forcing people not to act racist" rather than "men with guns forcing people to act racist"?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
So why is the inability to solve bigotry running from top to bottom of the entire society a point against libertarianism, but not against the system you support?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Okay... whatever our current system is, how would it solve the issue of everyone, from top to bottom, bring racist?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
This is symmetrical to what Darwin is claiming with JK Rowling.
Still not quite. What's missing is the reasoning for this claims being justified by some passage from Biden's autobiography, the other poster arguing that said passages say no such thing, it turning out that the original poster hasn't even read the autobiography and is blindly repeating completely made up claims, and when that's pointed out he then says "it doesn't matter".
It's not false at all that at least some factions of the Republican party want to eliminate trans people, although this need not necessarily mean "death camps". For some it probably does mean death camps though.
There are some factions that want to ban the whole Gender Affirming Care thing, and abolish all the special accommodations given to trans people. Sure, this is often interpreted by the pro-trans side as eliminationist, though such usage of the word is unconventional, and any honest person participating in a conversation would qualify it properly.
If you actually truly believe that the second sentence is a reasonable thing to say about any non-negligable amount of Republicans, and if you really truly believe there's nothing at all egregious about this conversation, then please step me through some of the other examples of bad posts you've given. Why is it ok to say "JK Rowling
I don't mind Darwin's opinions, just his debating tactics, but you seem to be objecting to the content of people's beliefs, which is a weird approach for me in itself, but combined with saying the content of Darwin's post is fine, actually, it's incomprehensible to me.
Is it that he didn't explicitly admit he was wrong about the point on JK Rowling? Nobody every does this in debates
Absolutely false. Plenty of people do. I'm sure you do so quite often yourself. Just off the top of my head, you didn't react to the link where GuessWho admits he's Darwin by saying "pff, that doesn't matter".
What is more rare, and should not be expected of others, is changing your mind about your broader worldview during the course of the debate, but conceding basic factual statements is a prerequisite for having a reasonable conversation. If you don't have that, you're not even in a conversation, you're in Monty Pythons Argument Clinic
Is it that his original post had an offhanded bailey in it that he abandoned to focus on defending the motte instead? See my prior post: yeah, it's a bit annoying, but it's very common.
Is it that he didn't bother to defend the bailey even though that's a prime area where Amadan wanted to press him on? You mentioned him saying "it doesn't matter" was a problem, but obviously people shouldn't be forced to defend dumb positions if they'd rather give up and just implicitly accept an L on a given topic.
An implicit L would be just dropping the topic of JK Rowling altogether, not trying to claim he didn't actually mean her specifically when he said "people like JK Rowling", then claiming he has good reasons to believe she actually has more extreme views than she lets on, based on her portrayal of trans people in her books, and then claiming none of it matters when it turns out he was wrong about her books. An explicit L should definitely be expected from a reasonable person, when they make a mistake of this magnitude.
Also, the moment you call it a motte and bailey, you concede the entire issue, in my opinion. Motte and Bailey is a dishonest, bad faith, and manipulative debating tactic, that's just an objective fact. As to whether he should be forced to defend the bailey, no - there should be no bailey! The whole spirit of this place is that any position that comes out of your mouth is one that you should be willing to defend. It's in the website's sidebar:
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
It's in the freakin' domain name!.
If you're still thinking "what's the big deal?", it's that his wasting people's time. I don't mind drive-by trolls like AlexanderTurok or BurdensomeCount, because they're signaling clearly that 90% of their content is just bants. I roll my eyes and move on, or I join in on the banter, either way I know what I'm getting into. OTOH, If I'm joining what appears to be a reasonable conversation I want to take it seriously. I don't particularly care for how outlandish an idea is, how absurd and obviously wrong it seems, if it is held sincerely, I want to see what makes the person tick, or to see if I'm missed some critical facts about the world if my worldview is so distant from their's. When it turns out I'm not in a conversation, but a 5D word-judo fight where it can easily turn out that "people like JK Rowling" doesn't mean "a group of people that JK Rowling is a central example of", but "a tiny subgroup that is in the same cluster as JK Rowling, because said cluster is defined to span half of the entire society, if not more", then I'm going to feel like an idiot for jumping into it to begin with.
You claim this sort of behavior is very common, but this is clearly disproven by the fact that people we able to recognize Darwin under his new alt, specifically by his particular brand of dishonesty, bad faith, and manipulation.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
If you and I were talking about US presidents, and I called Trump and Biden pieces of shit, that wouldn't be great but it'd be much less bad than if I called you specifically a piece of shit
That's exactly how I understood your argument, but my point is it doesn't work if you accept the logic of Darwin's argument, because in that case it wouldn't be calling you specifically, a piece of shit. You don't even enter the conversation. It's just about people like you, which is not at all connected to you specifically.
-"Biden wants to take all our guns!" -"No he doesn't" -"OK but he's the Democratic president, and there are Democratic factions that want to do that"
Kinda missing the part about backing away to a claim about Biden specifically that they think is more defensible, it turning out to also be also be false, and then saying "it doesn't matter" even though they started the conversation.
Stuff like this happens all the time. People rarely get all that fussed over it.
I don't think it does, and I don't think anyone would say "you only hate him because he's right wing" if you got fed up talking to a guy like that after many conversations over the course of several years.
It's not the raunchiness of it, it's that it's happening in the public (on the "town square" as it were), where all his friends, family, and acquaintances can see it.
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