2rafa
7hr 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
7hr 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
1d 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
1d 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
2d 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
3d 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
8d 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
8d 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.
2rafa
8d ago
I wonder if there is a divide on the right between those who say “the problem in Afghanistan was only that we just didn’t kill enough people” and those who take the Tucker Carlson paleo con / isolationist view that we need to get out of these foreign wars.
As others have said, this is a specific thing about Muslims from a guy who really doesn’t seem to like them, based on my impression of him. Not that I expect there are many Muslims in the US military, and those there are are surely assimilated enough to be fully on board with being deployed to the Middle East in service of US foreign policy goals (and so less likely to require a beard).
This is all reasonable and I’m very sympathetic to it. But then again, I don’t feel that someone too stupid to understand compound interest and with a time preference too high to understand saving money and/or not maxxing out every loan facility they have should have the same power over the direction of our shared society as me.
Because there is nothing stopping me, besides 20 years of inflexible habit and discipline, from just YOLOing with the nearly $40k of available credit they make available to me.
And yet, like you, tens of millions of responsible middle class people go their entire lives without ever deciding to blow their credit card limit, get a second mortgage and put it on the roulette table, or put their retirement savings into extreme out of the money options recommended on /r/wallstreetbets.
2rafa
9d ago
Yes of course, it’s a laughably high threshold. That said there are some (dubious) estimates that the average Anglo IQ in the Victorian era may have been as high as 108, so gentry landowners having a say 116 average really wouldn’t be out of the question.
2rafa
9d ago
Yeah this is an underrated terrible part of modern life. I personally think we need to massively reign in credit card companies given the fact that if someone carries a huge debt load for even half a year, it can set them back a decade in their financial life. It's frankly insane what we allow here.
The problem is that progressives (both in terms of race and class) spent decades promoting the message that “access to credit” was a key axis of intersectional inequality and the reason why various communities were locked out of “building wealth” that must be remedied as soon as possible. Of course lending to poor people, because of the inherent credit risk, can only be viable at very high rates to cover the many, many defaults involved.
Either you ban lending to the poor, and progressives whine about people locked out of credit and the opportunity to build wealth, or you allow them to borrow, and face the consequences. Blaming the lenders is ridiculous.
2rafa
9d ago
Yeah, there’s a meme on Anglo-reactionary Twitter, which I will do a post about at some point, that essentially says well you know popular democracy was designed for and works for 130 IQ Anglos. And the further you get away from that, you know, either the worse your democracy becomes or the less democracy you can have. Much of the American system over the last 150 years and before (thanks in some part to the wisdom of the founders) has been engineering things so that they still kind of work even when most voters aren’t 130 IQ Anglos, but there’s a limit to every system. Brazil is a democracy. India is a democracy. There are localized corruption issues but, generally speaking, these are countries in which the most popular party wins a majority in the legislature etc etc. They are still poor and dysfunctional.
2rafa
9d ago
There are other options. Forms of internal exile, for example, which has a long history over the millennia. Multiplayer servers that pool cheaters together away from rule-abiding players are one example.
A big part of the problem with Western modernity is universal human rights, not in a “some people shouldn’t have rights hahahaha” shitposting way, but in the sense that some people struggle to function in modernity and must, for their benefit and the benefit of wider society, live with a lesser amount of both liberty and responsibility.
We understand this in some cases, people with down’s, late stage dementia, low-functioning autism. But those one or two cognitive steps above them have been granted, by the courts, almost absolute freedom. This was the second components of the emptying of the asylums.
Modernity is complex and confusing, I think Moldbug makes the point that plenty of people who would have been quite capable in historical situations struggle to function in their interactions with the modern state, modern employment market, modern social customs, subtext.
These people don’t deserve to be slaves. They have value as people, and in our materially abundant and prosperous society they should be supported in finding their happiness. But, in their interests and those of wider society, they shouldn’t be as free as us either.
There must be a stage between liberty and being a total ward of the state. A half-freedom.
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.
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