2rafa
1d ago
The Chinese certainly have naturally isolationist tendencies but I think even they know that in the era of engineered global pandemics, nuclear weapons (whose proliferation is an inevitable consequence of the end of Pax Americana) and A(G)I, they will have no choice but to be involved, especially given their location at the edge of ongoing potential conflict zones between India and Pakistan, the Koreas etc.
The British and Dutch also started with purely mercantile aspirations, but the trouble with that is that eventually tribe #2 decides it wants to destroy tribe #1, and all your valuable ports and factories and mines are in tribe #1’s territory, so before you know it you’re a colonial power.
2rafa
1d ago
When AI kills the outsourced WITCH tech sector the consequence on the domestic middle class, consumer spending and so on in India is going to be grim, surely.
Very good points, but the small absolute volumes of REEs required means that effective transshipping will be very hard to stamp out unless all exports anywhere are curtailed, which would draw the ire of most of the regional trading partners that the CCP actually wants to continue to keep onside. The Chinese century is inevitable because western countries will descend into civil chaos due to mass immigration and for no other (major) reason.
2rafa
1d ago
The personal automobile (and even consequence of it, including the specifically American suburb) papers over the cracks of an unusually violent and dangerous first-world society, and has since the 1950s and 1960s.
America can transit, but that would require confronting the actual problem.
2rafa
1d ago
Finally, you're on the AGI hype/doom train. It would confound me beyond belief if the Mormon memeplex was the dominant one even in the near future. That's really unlikely, to say the least. In other words, a choice like that is to tell myself I have compromised my values, and for what? Something I can get anyway?
A recipe for an existence spent in the lobby of life, constantly waiting for something big to happen. Even if you agree with Yud that extinction is probably inevitable, there is nothing for it but to live as if it isn’t. (Speaking of that kind of ‘lie’ to the self…)
Finally, what's objective about it? In the strict sense? Do you seriously think that GDP per capita, indexes of mental health and TFR are such robust metrics that they overshadow everything else? Do you not care about anything else?
I believe the average Mormon in Utah lives a better life than the average person with a similar genetic makeup in almost every sense. This is backed up by metrics but is also backed up by vibes, aesthetics, and my personal experience.
How should we determine human flourishing? That’s a big question, but questions like “would I rather live in a slum in Kinshasa or a slum in Copenhagen?” or “is quality of life higher in Singapore or South Sudan?” can help up determine the baseline correlations if we can find it within ourselves to approach an answer.
The only catch is that you, the conscious entity reading this now, will be gone. The parasite will be piloting your body, living a life that is, by all objective measures, better than the one you are living now. Few of us would take that deal.
Semantic babble. Will the parasite have my memories, personalities and genetics? Will my children be genetically identical to my children if it doesn’t exist? Will ‘I’ love them the same way? Will my family not notice any difference? Will I be the same person in every conceivable non-magic sense? Will I act within the bounds of my own personality, developing naturally according to the genetic and environmental destiny with which I would otherwise have been aligned? If a comprehensive scan of brain and body were performed, would I be entirely identical to my current self?
If the answer to all of the above was ‘yes’, then sure, you’re just talking about a magic, better version of me. This is just a ‘brain upload’, something you yourself have expressed interest in.
For me, deliberately adopting a belief system I consider false, even for its wonderful benefits, feels too much like accepting the parasite.
You are not adopting it, you are suspending disbelief, no differently to when you watch a movie or play a video game and don’t obsess over plot holes. As others noted, we do this thousands of times a day, tell ourselves, friends and family thousands of little lies, just so stories. It is only your sentimental attachment to this specific narrative about religion and God that makes it harder for you to understand the same applies.
2rafa
2d ago
People should actually read scientific literature and look for things that usually work.
You Will Know Them By Their Fruits.
Mormons have produced a High Quality Civilization, even by Anglo standards (compare to the native English working class, beset by various issues).
Their tribe, their identity, their mode of being and living works, by an objective, scientific measure, indeed according to the only measures by which a civilization should be judged.
You, dear friend, are the one making the emotional argument. I am not emotional about it. I agree that this is a faith founded on a ridiculous story by a charlatan. But, by Jove, it works.
2rafa
3d ago
There is no panacea for delusion and bad decisions, just actions and traits that make succumbing to them less likely.
Indeed, and the problem is that it’s possible bad decisions are often a consequence of truth-seeking and an obsession with internal coherence. It may be that deep, personal introspection, and in particular a willingness to face the cold, hard emptiness of the universe with a grand disdain for spirituality and superstition is bad for us. Rationalism has no real answer to this beyond ‘nuh-uh’, ‘you’re doing it wrong’ and ‘maybe, but it doesn’t matter’, all of which I find profoundly unsatisfying.
When I think about the most fulfilling and happy moments of my life, none of them had to do with my (lifelong, since I was perhaps three or four years old, and really I have no recollection of ever having any belief in god) atheism. There were no euphoric moments, was no enlightenment by my intelligence. Instead I think of simple company, family and friends, the feeling of being part of bigger and greater things, being at peace with my life, my past, my future, and in time with my passing.
2rafa
3d ago
Congratulations on finding a faith, it makes me happy to know I played some (very) small part in it, and I wish you all the best on that journey.
2rafa
3d ago
You can make a soup by frying, say, various raw ingredients and then pouring water over them in a big pot and bringing it to the boil and then eventually after some time consuming it. There are ways of making coffee that are mechanically extremely similar.
This is a known strategy, but coming after a discussion on the downsides of wireheading, it creates a certain cognitive dissonance.
As I recall, my objection to wireheading was largely that it seemed unaesthetic and depressing, that I don’t want to be the human version of a mouse in a dopamine button experiment, etc, and that I think it is probably inherently unfulfilling. I even included a personal example of what I think that kind of life leads to among the very rich, which you refuted by implying they probably just need to recalibrate their own measures of life satisfaction.
By contrast, looking at the happy, stable, prosperous, fecund, clean, healthy and attractive Mormon community and concluding that it would be a smart move to join them is precisely the opposite philosophical choice, the equivalent of taking up the hard work of, say, going to the gym or forcing yourself onto 20 first dates in a year because you know the outcome of a healthier body or an eventual happy marriage and family are things that will fulfil you more than your present existence.
That is not to disagree completely. I won’t speak for @Hoffmeister25, but I think it would be hard for me, or most of us here, to truly convincingly become Mormons in the religious sense. There are some very smart born Mormons here who have indeed, despite being part of this largely (post-)rationalist and atheist community, resisted the urge to look behind the curtain, and I respect them for that, but I have looked behind the curtain and read the catastrophically persuasive takedown of the entire structural basis for the faith written by that one guy and widely shared online and I think I would find it hard to overcome that.
But does it matter? Hundreds of generations of extremely intelligent people lived and died as true believers of the absolute sort, could not even conceive of an atheism in the way we do today. Hoff’s children will be believers, will (or had least may) resist looking behind the curtain they have known their whole lives, and so at ‘worst’ he is making a sacrifice for their happy and prosocial future.
Good luck, I can't really find it in me to condemn you, but I wish you hadn't gone down this rabbit hole even if it has hot blondes and fun, family-friendly activities along the way.
At some point, and I think a few ‘sacred cows’ of liberalism are like this, you have to look around you and determine that actually maybe I’m the one who believes something that makes for a worse, less fulfilled society, no matter how “objectively true” it is (and often it isn’t, even, objectively true, although I think on religion it might be). Better that my children should be happy believers than unhappy philosophers.
2rafa
4d ago
Not really. Sure, modern Germany only allowed immigrants to naturalize in 1991 (and large numbers of Turks only started actually doing it more recently), but there was no large scale deportation and so in effect they had de facto ‘permanent residency’ since the 1950s. Kohl considered trying to deport some but it was considered too much effort so they didn’t. Even after recruitment of Gastarbeiter stopped in 1973 family reunification continued and had always been allowed even if it was ‘discouraged’.
That is kind of the story of mass immigration to Europe, especially around family reunification. Once you have that, you have children in public schools, the whole system breaks down and some degree of naturalization is seemingly inevitable because you’ve created a class of de facto permanent residents (in the Gulf only wealthy expats send kids to (private) schools; kafala migrants have no family reunification rights).
The German Turks existed in this state (huge extended families and many children living in Germany) for 30+ years without getting citizenship, but it didn’t really matter because no effort was made to remove them and they were comfortable, their kids attended public schools, they had access to welfare and social housing etc etc.
2rafa
4d ago
A lot of the failure comes from the fact that European countries could not really fathom a guest worker program with NO route to permanent residency. There was a need for guest workers, but we should just have used the Kafala system. No family members. No route to citizenship. Mandatory return home for a 6 month period every 5 years.
AI (and more specifically multimodal LLMs) will radically transform the life of every man, woman and child on earth in the next decade.
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be a huge valuation bubble burst along the way.
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There’s extreme cross-ownership / circular dealing in the market where Nvidia is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI companies and data centers who buy its chips, pushing up their valuations, meaning they can borrow and issue more capital to make more orders for more GPUs, meaning NVIDIA can pour more money into… etc. This is and has been widely noted as a feature of all major sector-driven bubbles in the history of capitalism.
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Even if AI ends up being huge (and it will), that doesn’t mean most people are going to make money on it. The railroad bubble is the most famous example of this; between the 1840s and 1890s every major capital market on earth had multiple successive railroad bubbles (which were the ultimate cause of almost every financial crisis in this era because speculative railroad investments failing triggered bank crises / runs and subsequent failures which triggered credit crises that spiralled out in weeks to the wider market). Railroads really did change the world and drive huge improvements in commerce and communication, and therefore economic growth and productivity specifically. But most people who invested in the railroad business lost the majority of what they put in, even in cases in which construction was completed. Today, commercial railroads are relatively profitable after 130+ years of consolidation and modest valuations, and passenger railroads all lose money outside of Japan.
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Big AI companies have no moats. Competitive models are at least semi-open-sourced. Brand means nothing when most corporate and consumer platforms can be easily switched over to another foundation model in seconds, if OpenAI ekes out more margin then you switch to Anthropic or XAI or vice versa, and price-per-token gains are quickly made by all the big players; engineers jump between them far too often to maintain a real competitive edge for long. Plus, whether you’re 3% better at an arbitrary benchmark means very little to most corporates, so within broad quality categories price will be the main factor. AI datacenters have the same GPUs and so compete solely on price for compute; they have tiny labor / upkeep costs, so this is essentially just electricity and GPU depreciation (the latter of which will be an industry standard before long if it isn’t already) plus a tiny margin that your competitors will constantly be chipping away for everyone. Everyone in AI except Nvidia is selling a commodity with little pricing power, and even with Nvidia a bubble burst will depress demand and AMD and the Chinese may well eventually catch up.
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Many industries that will be initially disrupted by AI will collapse almost entirely rather than shifting to being primarily AI customers. If half the big SaaS or advertising or media companies signing megabillion AI contracts implode because AI code tools allow their valuable corporate clients or end users (in the case of TV, movies, games) to replicate their products and services in house…that actually means lower revenue for the big AI providers, not higher revenue. The same goes for big spenders on white collar software tools like law firms, financial services companies, accountants, consultants, insurers, tech outsourcers and so on. If white collar workers are fired en masse, demand for Microsoft’s central Office 365 product collapses, because it’s billed on a per-user basis. If the ad industry suffers because consumers spend less because they’ve been fired, there goes the source of 80-90% of Google and Meta’s revenue, which means much less to spend on GPUs.
Thus AI’s success and failure are both bearish for these stocks.
2rafa
5d ago
Even if Obama could run for a third term he would just end up becomming as insufferable as Harris.
I am absolutely convinced that Obama would win a third term if he was able to run. Polling reflects that as far as I know, by a substantial margin. Not only is he uniquely good for black turnout but he could run on a unity message to appeal to enough suburban whites, and he wouldn’t need that many, to win.
Obama’s almost unique strength was that he could be a lot of things to a lot of people in a different way than a ‘classical’ superstar politician - like Margaret Thatcher or Donald Trump - can. The latter have different audiences who interpret their personalities and political identities in different ways, but their actual brands were relatively consistent.
Obama actually didn’t have a consistent brand. He meticulously (perhaps as a consequence of his own unusual and fractured identity) cultivated multiple distinct personalities. Obama the hero for millennials, the reformer, the “change” candidate against tired old Hillary and McCain, the candidates of the financial crisis and the Iraq war. Obama the devout Black Christian initially skeptical of gay marriage who, unlike so many other successful black men, married a (dark skin) black woman, had a beautiful family, put on that slight southern accent with more than a hint of AAVE when speaking to black churches in Georgia and Alabama. Obama the technocrat, the Yale lawyer, the internationalist, the son of a diplomat, who hired all the bright young things out of Harvard and Georgetown and governed a cabinet of experts, the European Obama.
2rafa
6d ago
This is why the hereditary principle is important.
Here’s how I’d structure Ivy undergraduate admissions.
50% of places reserved for people whose grandfathers graduated from the college (meritocracy by test scores to sort between them).
20% of places reserved for people whose parents, but not grandparents, attended. Each requires one reference from someone in the first category (a third-generation graduate) to check if they’re a decent member of society. Interview to sort between them to check for personality.
20% of places reserved for those with the best test scores of any origin - three quarters of these reserved for domestic students, one quarter for international.
10% of places auctioned off to the highest bidder, at Harvard and Yale it is likely bidding could start in excess of $10m per undergraduate place.
Most importantly, while people could guess or volunteer which group a student or graduate was in, the university would never officially confirm it.
Well, London’s clubland is an amalgamation of places that all look the same and which cater to a clientele that sounds the same (to the outsider, at least) but which are all subtly different. Dispossessed landed gentry va dispossessed bona fide aristocracy vs the hereditary longstanding upper middle class vs various pretenders. People of the same class who live in the country or in the city primarily. People who don’t have to work who choose not to and people who don’t have to who choose to. That is why there are all those subtle distinctions between White’s, Boodle’s, The Carlton, Brook’s, The Guards (and now Cavalry), and so on. Then you have those for Scots, gentleman farmers/landowners who take an interest in farming, etc.
Still, I have to disagree with you and @MadMonzer. Annabels has always had plenty of real aristocrat members, you’re more likely to find the remaining young, moneyed members of the real British upper class there than anywhere else, including the ghastly Five Hertford.
I won't call you sentimental, but you're clearly being tyrannical. That's none of our business.
I have no interest in pure wireheading or climbing into a thinly veiled Skinner Box, but I have little interest in stopping others from doing so.
Say your son becomes a heroin addict. All he does all day is get high and waste his life. He has UBI and lives in social housing, so his financial situation isn't precarious. He has a sophisticated future chip implant for dosage that always just stops him from ingesting a fatal dose. He never goes outside, and he has a dark web supplier who delivers by mail (easily affordable on his UBI check), so he's no aesthetic or criminal or otherwise problem for the public.
Would you be happy for him? Would you be proud of him? Would you care about him doing that with his life?
Call it empathy, but I do care, I do consider it my business, and I have interest in stopping others from doing so, whether they are my family or my community or my countrymen and women or just the wider human race. There are a lot of decent people out there who deserve better than a life as an addict, having never created anything. It doesn't have to be "of value", this isn't an economic question. In a post-scarcity world I think it better for people to play sports, socialize in person, work with their hands, craft, cook, construct, have children, raise them, fall in love (with each other). Is that an aesthetic preference? Sure.
But it's also an empathetic one. Most people don't have the agency and the time preference setup to be able to autonomously turn off the dopamine pump. We don't know if we would, which is why they tell you never to try heroin. Even plenty of people who want to quit tobacco never make it, even if they really want to. It seems to me supremely arrogant to assume that so many people, not least yourself, have that degree of control over their own happiness, their own destiny. This is likely a philosophical difference between us.
Sometimes people need to be saved from themselves. You acknowledge this in the way in which we often discuss it, homeless drug addicts threatening people on subways, feral children who never finish school, but it's not just about the negative externalities, not just about the fact that it makes things harder for me, or for you. It's about them too, and about us, because while we maintain a work ethic and some discipline today, who knows how that will hold up in the face of the entertainment that is coming?
Sure, maybe we can rewire ourselves to inject fake memories of an entire life well-lived, winters by the warm hearth, homes built by hand, children's clothes sewn, religious services attended, adventures had, and then cheat ourselves to fulfilment that way. But even that is a little sad, when so much of the promise of automated abundance is that finally we can take a step back (with our hopefully longer lifespans) and do all of these things. And yes, I think forcing people to do them is better, and will make them happier, than allowing them to press the pleasure button all day, which the vast majority of people, quite possibly pretty much everyone, will do if you let them and if the button is good enough - which you and I both agree it probably will be.
My preference, by the way, would be for a status hierarchy with a baseline that allows for real wireheaders to do what they do, but which provides superior status and more resources to those who embrace a more fulfilling, communal and meaningful existence, as defined in various but strongly overlapping ways by philosophers going back to Socrates.
Is that really so much worse than hiring tenured STEM faculty who actually just write zero-value low-impact papers for sci-ed journals about the history of race in science? Mr Creationist can sit in his nice office at Harvard and write papers for the Kansas Journal of Creation Science and teach a class on creationism that 5 students a year (4 of whom are just curious about this strange ideological subculture) will take and that's fine. In time though, even his presence will, in a small way, counter the equally poor equivalents on the left.
2rafa
11d ago
When I was a young child, I cried every single morning for years because I didn’t want to go to school. Often my parents had to physically carry me out of the house before I begrudgingly accepted I was going, and I would cry the entire way.
But I loved school. Every day I had a great time and I’d be sad to come home and I’d tell my parents about who I spoke to and played with and how much fun I had. Much more than if I’d have stayed at home.
Adulthood is often similar. I was depressed for a year and stopped working because I was so sad and my life felt empty and meaningless. I got very lucky that an old coworker offered me a new job and everyone in my life essentially forced me to accept, and when I started I suddenly found things cleared up. I liked talking to people every day, I enjoyed working toward a goal, the sense of achievement after a long week, meeting new people, small talk about nothing in particular.
But if I hadn’t gotten lucky or had my arm twisted into accepting that lucky break, I fully know I could have spent another five years doing nothing on my couch, watching YouTube video essays and every Real Housewives franchise and reading and playing video games.
Not everyone knows what will make them happy. Even fewer can force themselves to do what will. Traditional institutions like early marriage and the expectation that couples produce children exist in part because sometimes it’s only with the passage of time that we realize the happiness and fulfillment these things bring us.
Let 10 year olds eat as much candy as they want, stay up all night to play video games and skip school and they will, no matter how much their future selves might regret it. Adults aren’t so different. If you give people basic income and infinite free amazing quality entertainment then certain consequences are inevitable, and if you care about the wellbeing of your fellow man (and I do) then that is suboptimal even if the machines can look after us.
The only thing that has even a remote chance of working is forcing universities to hire thousands of young right-wing tenured faculty for ‘ideological balance’. The left will still try to allow them to all be fired when they come back to power, but you can at least try to hold that up in the courts. The grant stuff is meaningless, they will swear fealty to this regime to get money and in a few years will swear fealty to the next. The only thing that works is getting your people into the machine.
I don’t know, I think company and companionship with other biological humans are important. Call me sentimental but if everyone’s going to be living out hyperrealistic fantasies in VR for dopamine for 80 years then I struggle to see why you mightn’t just save the resources and administer them a euphoric fatal heroin dose and be done with it.
I am increasingly absolutely convinced that a fulfilling post-scarcity world will involve mandatory make-work, not 40 hours a week of fake emailing (ideally), but forced interaction with other human beings, teamwork, shared projects, civic engagement, some kind of social credit to encourage basic politeness and decency even if you don’t need them to survive and so on.
I grew up with many people who already live ‘post scarcity’ lives on account of great inherited wealth and the ones who consume all day are universally less happy than the ones who work, even in high pressure jobs, even though they will inherit more than they could make in a thousand years.
Wall-E is about the choice that post-scarcity offers. At the end, when the humans are replanting trees and clearing garbage it’s clear that AI and robotics are good enough in this universe to do this work, but it’s the humans who win when they do it themselves.
2rafa
11d ago
Some of the really bad consequences of media addiction are currently limited by the low quality of most ‘bulk’ visual content (reels, daytime TV, YouTube, most video games).
When you get to a stage where you can cheaply generate infinite seasons of Mad Men or Sopranos or Red Dead Redemption quality entertainment, such that you can play a 5000 hour Rockstar campaign or watch 10,000 episodes of your favorite comfy comedy show with no discernible dip in quality, it’s over.
Wall E remains, the failure to predict Ozempic excluded, the most deeply prescient piece of 21st century mainstream science fiction media.
Always? It’s part of the former Ottoman Empire, part of the ‘Arab World’, part of the “MENA” demographic and geographic category which is widely used, and closely genetically, culturally and religiously related for thousands of years.
‘East’ is obviously dubious if you’re in Germany and we’re talking about Morocco, but the orient and occident were long more than just geographic designations.
Neither did the British at first, but eventually you have no choice but to care, because the other side might ally with someone else or extort you for more.
Sure, but in a regional total war a key revenue-generating asset like that is getting bombed to nothing on day one, so the practical outcome is that they are invested in that kind of conflict. Comparative trifles in Burma (which are a little more complex than ‘supporting both sides’ I’d say, though my understanding is far from comprehensive) don’t suggest otherwise. Agree mostly on Taiwan, though one can’t discount face.
I think the chance that China emerges unscathed from nuclear war involving all the largest powers on its border is very, very low. Involvement in several forms would be inevitable, and at that point the likelihood of getting nuked increases significantly. As for the Islamist threat, ‘rogue nuke’ is very 1990s; it is possible but I suspect the next major attack will have another format. China is less safe than you think; vigorous imprisonment and surveillance of the kind unimaginable in the West have reduced the number of domestic attacks, but I wouldn’t discount the very substantial number of jihadists now in Central Asia and elsewhere with a very strong grudge to bear. Russian collapse doesn’t mean that nukes will fall into the hands of Islamists who want to nuke the USA or Israel either, in fact given the locations of key sites and the personnel and staffing structure of the relevant agencies that is relatively unlikely.
More specifically, state failure doesn’t happen overnight and the respective officials with knowledge of all devices and sites will gladly trade that information to the Americans and/or Chinese in exchange for money and safe passage to a life in Gulf exile a week before the storming of the presidential palace.
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