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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
Trump v. CASA, Inc.
So after this decision, what is actually the intended recourse for classes of individuals if the federal government subjects them to putative unconstitutional action (possibly even gish-gallopping different actions to achieve the same unconstitutional outcome)? I can see how the previous arrangement created an asymmetry in favour of case-and-jurisdiction shoppers, but the new one seems like it might equally create an asymmetry in favour of executive obsessions.
I understand that you are happy to see what you saw as an important weapon in your enemy's toolkit denied, but well, the enemy is best presumed to be crafty. If you were a progressive operative, could you imagine a way this decision could be turned against conservatives once you control the executive again?
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3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
I think the reality of the situation is that we still do not understand, outside of some special basic cases, in the slightest how genes correspond to phenotypes, beyond a sort of general sense that should make it clear to us that we do not even have the vocabulary and abstractions to describe such an understanding if it were handed down to us by divine inspiration. I'd expect the simplest nontrivial gene-IQ relationships to look something like "the presence of sequence A slightly reduces the frequency sequence B is transcribed into proteins in neurons when they contain between x and y concentration of transcripts of sequence C, so in individuals whose genetic makeup causes the concentration to converge to that band in their frontal lobe, they get slightly thicker myelin sheaths in that part of their brain, which might make you more smart except if it also happens in the temporal lobe in which case you just turn out schizo". Do we have analysis techniques that would pick this sort of thing up? My impression is that expecting our current ones to do so is comparable to trying to debug slowdowns in complex distributed systems by big-data search for correlations between system performance and the frequency (possibly joint) of individual words in source code.
To introduce a juicier culture war angle, the confusion about the discrepancy, i.e. the expectation that techniques like GWAS would pick up the heritability we expect from twin studies, seems to be motivated by the usual prior that surely the top-of-the-line techniques that the community of experts in a given area are excited about must at least be somewhat good (see also expectation that architects have good taste in architecture, artists have good taste in art, or social justice researchers can correctly identify and redress injustice in society). If you expect geneticists to not be meaningfully competent at genetics in absolute terms, then "geneticists could not find the mechanism of heritability that we are fairly certain exists" is an unsurprising outcome.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
In what way is a beehive "male-created"?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
That seems like the wrong metaphor, given that a Queen Bee will primarily be attended to by a full hive of female worker bees (that the males don't even get to stay in).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
Why can't you accept that people might find the excel spreadsheet posting interesting even if they are uninterested in her Onlyfans presence/career choices? The wider community has plenty of $.02-a-word substackers who maintain an audience peddling more boring theories backed by less data on more boring and commonplace topics, and those don't seem to inspire this sort of permanent rent-free mental residency that compels people to start raging about her in a thread about someone else whose only commonalities are blogging and being on Onlyfans. This is as if dozens of people complained about Jake from Putanumonit under every discussing of an article about dating by someone in fintech.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
After watching the video and some others on the same channel, it seems mostly interesting as a really extreme example of the art of generating gravitas by speaking slowly and pausing a lot. Somehow, he manages to get you to slow down your mental clock to match the pace of his speech, rather than getting bored or distracted.
(And yes, he does come across as wise and witty, but a lot of people could probably muster this level of wit if they actually could take that long to decide what to say without losing their audience. The ability to keep the listener suspended seems to be key.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
I feel like "emotional labor" is among the most toxic memes to come out of feminism, in the actual near-Lovecraftian sense that it insinuates itself into your world model and begs you to cleave reality at that particular joint to your permanent detriment as a human being. I'm not even in the target group, but every time I get even a little frustrated dealing with someone else's mental state (like, say, listening to a friend complain about how they were avoiding their advisor even though they and I had gone through the "I'm having [unfounded anxiety] and rationally I just need to psyche myself up to send that email already" conversation path many times already) the idea floats up and wants me to start keeping score.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
Matter of fact, it has been my fetish ever since that one time I dated a math grad student with impostor syndrome.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
The term has been floating around in the self-help literature sphere, and even made it onto Wiktionary (which claims that it's chiefly used in "philosophy"). I would assume that it was introduced by people who didn't want their poetic self-help goals tarnished by association with the more prosaic readings of "meaningful" (like not of insignificant scale or impact, not nonsensical, etc.): if you say you are striving for meaningfulness, some are bound to read it as a win-friends-and-influence-people sort of thing.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
Have you actually encountered these women who approach relationships by being boss bitches with unchecked neuroticism yourself, or are you reciting a culture war catechism or something you have seen others claim on the internet? I have been through and seen plenty of failure modes of relationships, but nothing like "the woman refuses to be nice, warm, loving or create a positive atmosphere for the sake of political LARPing" has been among them.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
Thanks for always posting these stories! I'm curious how the pro-Palestine monoculture you describe comes to be in the UK - is this stance already the predominant one in their media? Here in Germany, every mainstream outlet is solidly pro-Israel, and since COVID at the latest media skepticism has become right-coded. As a result, we get some wild right-side-of-history positions like "we should let Israel do its thing and take in all the Palestinians as refugees here", along with vegan housecat fantasies that Israel and Palestine could get along if Bibi just were replaced by a proper left-wing leader.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
I always thought of it as a corollary of motte-and-bailey (arranged something like that old "their barbarous wastes" two-castle picture) - [I get to keep] my bailey > my motte > the opponent[ gets to keep hi]s motte > the opponent's bailey.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
I get being against what is happening in Gaza, but so many people seem to be completely ignorant of the history of conflict, perhaps willfully so.
What is an example of a piece of history of the conflict that you think would change people's minds if they were aware of it?
I seem to be coming from a broadly similar background as you (I was a grad student around when you say you lived in Israel, and visited the country around the same time, and am an "alt-left" outlier on this forum), and I see much of the same facts on the ground as you do (Israel is quite livable, Arab-run countries are shitholes, etc.) (though your benchmarking against the West Bank, which is kind of an Israeli-run open air concentration camp, is a bit disingenuous), and yet I'm increasingly falling in the delenda est camp just because the Israelis have proven time and time again that they are unwilling to compromise on their monomanic obsession to capture and subjugate. For me, this does not even come from a particular reflex to support "the oppressed", as I for example am leaning towards kicking all the Islamic refugees out of Europe to the extent achievable under the law. It's just that I do believe in some baseline of human rights including some degree of freedom, bodily safety and self-determination, and the very existence of Israel from the point of its founding seems to just amount to a wanton cruel ploy to deny these to the previous residents of the clay they took.
I think the Palestinians should be allowed to govern themselves in a miserable theocratic shithole, if they are so inclined; if the Israelis want to build a purposeful country with nice infrastructure and great food production, more power to them, but they should have done so on land they obtained fair and square. I'm sure I could run a very spiffy software development startup in tidy quarters where I also cook two delicious meals a day, but would it be acceptable for me to do that by commandeering a random crack addict's shack and keeping the previous owner locked up naked in the basement, subject to regular beatings (frequency and intensity increased if he lashes out against me) if I also sometimes share some of my food with him (surely better than the slop his buddy who got to keep his shack next door eats)?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
My understanding is that some amount of actual stealing took place and was admitted to early on (the 2005 end of the dispute), and after that it was mostly arcane contractual disputes which can best be approximated by something like: Russia was selling gas to Ukraine at well-below-market/charity rates while it was a puppet state, but wanted to start charging market after they had the revolution to bring in the pro-Western guy, which Ukraine couldn't afford (and they might already have been in arrears from before), and so UA decided to basically hold westward transit hostage to demand continued sub-market deliveries (and may either have stolen gas from transit attempts, or asserted a contractual right to take it; hard to find objective information); while the Western states, having alternatives and not liking the idea that Ukraine would be incentivised with cheap gas to not be pro-Western, approved of this process.
EU also didn't find any proof that the gas was stolen IIRC.
This means as little in the context as if Russia found "proof", since the EU wanted to back their own puppet. If we wanted objective information, perhaps we should have put an Indian investigative team on the case as they did in the Korean war...
True. But if you do your diligence, you'll find that we (Russians) were rarely good guys.
Eh. My reading is that at least in several of the post-'90s conflicts, their moral batting average was pretty average. I do think it was evil on the strategic level that they essentially wanted to keep Ukraine perpetually poor and dependent, though the exact ways in which they did it seem more business-as-usual to me; on the other hand, e.g. in Georgia 2008, I think they were morally in the right (Georgia shot first, and I don't see their moral claim to the separatist areas). Chechnya, and the quite possibly false-flag apartment bombings - evil, for sure (though I think the Chechens were/are also a nasty bunch, so it was black-on-dark-grey warfare like the US invasion of Afghanistan). In the case of Transnistria, I also don't see Moldova's moral claim.
More importantly, though, I think it doesn't matter because orthogonally to interior politics, the post-WWII US (and friends) is more evil than Russia. (I mean, just in this year, Israel has killed more civilians in Gaza than Russia has in Ukraine for the whole duration of the war!) I'd rather have zero tyrants on the world stage than one, but if we have to have at least one, I'd rather have 2+, so they at least have to throw some morsels to us in the NPC countries occasionally lest we all align with the respective other. When I argue against the morality of the US camp, it's strictly in the service of the implications of this viewpoint: a world in which every credible challenger to the US has been neutered is worse than the one we currently inhabit.
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8d ago
· Edited 7d ago
In an alternate history of nuclear-armed Ukraine, I believe Putin will choose a different country to invade instead
...which one? Do you figure there is some priority list of countries he wants to invade? What does it look like?
In our history, Ukraine is always a somewhat Russian friendly country before Russia fucked them hard by all the means after 2000, would Russia fuck with the government of a nuclear-armed, Russian friendly Ukraine?
The Russian view there is quite different - as they contend, at some point after the early 2000s, Ukraine started responding to its economic malaise by stealing gas meant for transit to EU customers to help itself meet its own demand, with some complicity from EU states who refused to hold Ukraine responsible for this diplomatically while also working to sabotage any projects for new pipelines that would bypass Ukraine completely (in EU propaganda, this was framed as the bypass pipelines "enabling Russia to blackmail Ukraine" - as in, blackmail it with the threat of taking away the free gas). If a nuclear-armed Ukraine becomes a pariah in your scenario, is the dominant consequence that its economy is in even more shambles (so it needs to steal more gas) or that the EU objections to bypass pipelines disappear (so it never gets the opportunity to steal as much gas)?
A scenario in which Russia still depends on them for transit but now they are even more desperate to extract unnegotiated concessions for it may not be one in which Russia sees it as friendly. Certainly, my memory is that even in reality, the gas siphoning resulted in a lot of grassroots resentment towards Ukraine among Russians at the time, to the point that they could have easily been persuaded to endorse some punitive aggression against it by a thus inclined statesman.
(I find it interesting that the gas transit story is never mentioned in mainstream reporting on the war, not even with a framing that puts all the blame on Russia. Through my conspiracy goggles, this looks like another instance of a general pattern of producing simple good/evil narratives by cutting off history at a convenient point - in the media, the Israel/Palestine war started on 24-10-07, Russia/Ukraine started in 2014 with a little exemption for the Budapest Memorandum in murky prehistory, and everyone/Iran started with the Islamic Revolution. No hard questions about who shot first. Not that this is new - America/Japan, they claim, started with Pearl Harbor, too.)
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8d ago
How does this follow? Ukraine could do great damage to Russia if it used one nuke or a handful, sure, but Russia could use a fraction of its nuclear arsenal to turn Ukraine into an uninhabitable wasteland. Besides, there is already a level of escalation available to Ukraine that is of the nuke nature without being of the same degree, which is that they could use their ample supply of mid/long-range drones to strike civilian centers with incendiary charges. Why do you figure they do not do that, by the same reasoning, whatever it is?
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9d ago
Thanks for your kind words.
I think that you are on to an important aspect with your consideration of the history of nuclear war - this history is also a history of our theory of and intuitions on deterrence, which may not be fully applicable to modern-day situations. Most of our expectations around it evolved in the peculiar setting of two fragile apex powers locked in what felt like an unstable equilibrium in a life-or-death struggle - both the US and the USSR saw themselves as standing atop a slippery slope to complete defeat, as a USA that lost a single direct engagement with the USSR would thereafter just be a strictly weaker, less intimidating USA (and vice versa), and if they were barely stemming the tide of global communism (capitalism) now, how would they fare then? In such a setting, a "not a step back" policy is sensible and credible.
On the other hand, is this true for Ukraine? One can argue that a Ukraine that has lost Crimea, and even Donbass, is in some meaningful sense a leaner and meaner Ukraine - they are rid of the albatross around their neck that were the initially about 50% at least ambivalently pro-Russian population, both by capture and galvanization of those who remain, and backed by a West with a significantly greater sense of urgency and purpose. As 2022~ showed, Ukraine's subjugation is not in fact a monotonic slope but comes with a very significant hump around the 25% mark. What should be the theory of nuclear deterrence for that scenario? I think there is at least circumstantial evidence that it is different - since 199X, aggression towards nuclear-armed countries has not proceeded in line with the Cold War at all, whether it is India/Pakistan or in fact US/Russia.
Could you imagine, in 1980, US-made weapons hitting Russian cities using US targeting and US satellites? I'd say that the reason this is possible is that there is common knowledge that some HIMARS hits on Belgorod do not in fact leave a Russia that is strictly less able to prosecute a conflict against the West in which it is already barely managing. The modern theory of deterrence may look more like identifying the humps that disrupt the slippery slope, and trying to beat your opponent back to one of those humps but no further, versus... trying to push your humps as far up the slope as possible?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9d ago
I would find that quite interesting if true - both because I'm in the affected demographic, and because I consider MPB as one of the main pending milestone cases for radical medical life extension. In many ways it's an ideal baby version of the problem: age-related, highly prevalent, great market potential, no stigma around research, external, easily measurable objective success metric with quick feedback, doesn't directly involve any critical organs. It's quite likely that age-related organ failure involves a lot of metaphorical "hair", so as long as we couldn't figure out how to stop and reverse age degrading actual hair, I figure there is no chance that we could do this to the "hair" that might be some ion channels on the pancreas that we only have a tentative understanding of.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9d ago
· Edited 9d ago
One question I feel is underexplored is, to what extent would things have gone differently for a hypothetical nuclear-armed Ukraine? It seems plausible enough that in the first few weeks of the conflict, when Russia was actually aiming for the jugular, Nuclear Ukraine could have countered with a credible nuclear threat. However, if Ukraine magicked up a full nuclear triad now, would much of anything change? That is, would it be able to credibly threaten MAD to demand back Crimea and Donbass alone? (I don't think so. It seems pretty obvious that the more realistic form of their current war goals - EU and NATO membership for a rump state minus approximately what Russia has taken, plus or minus some more parts of Donbass - is too valuable to go va banque over, plus the West has an enduring interest in maintaining the nuclear-strike taboo lest the End of History gets undone any further.) Consequently, could it have credibly threatened MAD when Russia grabbed Crimea? ...when it supported the Donbass separatists in uprising? ...if, instead of doing the push for Kiev, Russia only had blitzed for the territory it controls now from the start, declaring that it wants to seize a buffer zone for Crimea and the Donbass separatists? In the worst case, Ukrainian nukes would merely have stopped Russia from making its grand opening mistake (blowing its confidence and certain classes of special force reserves on a useless operation).
Ukraine's fundamental dilemma is that while the EU/NATO exists and is friendly to it, it is very hard for it to credibly signal that it has its back to the wall; but if the EU/NATO backstop were to disappear, it would become very hard for it to marshal the will and unifying purpose to resist Russia.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11d ago
US/Israel/Iran/Russia.
It seems quite conspicuous how on one hand US engagement with the Israel/Iran war, widely seen as something that is very personal for Trump for whatever reason, coincides with a much-lamented acceleration of the softening of his stance on Russia; and on the other hand Russia is also conspicuously sitting on the fence regarding the conflict, despite their previous military collaboration with Iran and it being ostensibly natural for them to take this opportunity to set another trap for the Western coalition.
Do you figure it could be the case that Trump decided to buy Putin's neutrality on the matter by offering him at least a period of US stonewalling on further pro-Ukraine action? The null hypothesis I can think of is that Putin just independently appreciates that Israel has been reticent to support Ukraine directly so far, while Trump's rapprochement with Russia is just a natural continuation of his preexisting trajectory and not particularly connected to Iran.
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11d ago
Is there a difference between this level of "not taking [the principle] literally", and it just not being the real principle? If you can "misread" international law as "the US and those in good standing with it should be the arbiters of what is permissible between nations", then you can also misread "do not kill humans even if they are of negative age" as "women should be raising children, not fucking around", and in both cases I would say it's not so much that you don't believe anything, as that you believe the latter but realise that touting that principle is a bad look/likely to decrease support for you.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11d ago
In my eyes, the international law thing I mentioned feels like blatant belief substitution (I don't think "rationalisation" is quite the right term for the postulated mechanism, where a low-status value is replaced by a higher-status subgoal that serves it) due to how self-serving and selective it is - but it seems to be believed by absolute majorities in countries like Germany without even having a well-defined proximate outgroup rejecting it. Why would it not be plausible that pro-lifers, who are less of a majority and are in a mutual chokehold against an outgroup rejecting this premise, could do the same thing? (Though to begin with, it's not really well-defined where the boundary between rationalising and normal belief formation even lies.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11d ago
In what way is this integrity? If this is actually what is going on, it's more like motte ("abortion is murder, I want to stop murder") and bailey ("nothing to force hoes to become housewives like saddling them with a baby").
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
12d ago
· Edited 12d ago
More to the point, there really, legitimately are lots of people who, when it comes to abortion specifically, do not think there’s a possible case of abortion that is morally wrong.
I mean, I know - I'm one of them! The case you describe still does sound morally wrong to me, in the same way in which drugging your daughter and submitting her to a cosmetic surgery would be. This is still not "women can do no wrong" - it's interesting how culture warriors on both sides refuse to believe that the other side could actually disagree with them on the moral status of fetuses, and think it must actually all be about women (blue: "red just wants to punish women for recreational sex" - red: "blue thinks women can do no wrong").
(Not that I'm not guilty of this myself - it is still genuinely different for me to believe in my heart that right-wingers really think fetuses are people being murdered, and it's not just a case of the real principle being rationalised by a loftier one like when people always remember international law when their enemies break it. It's hard when many of the same people are arguing a few threads down that women having sex with no prospect of marriage or childbirth is the root of all of our problems.)
I'm not familiar enough with the US anymore to know if what you say about reds (not) wielding injunctions is accurate, but one could imagine the theoretical possibility playing a role even if reds never did it, if, for example, we posit that blues had a more accurate picture of what the different jurisdictions could do and therefore avoided taking executive steps they know would be stopped by injunction.
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