ArmedTooHeavily
Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.
User ID: 2895
ArmedTooHeavily
4d ago
Just finished "I, Claudius" (big thumbs up) and started "Cute Accelerationism", which is basically about "cuteness" as an inhuman thing summoned from the Outside by technology. One of the co-authors was in the CCRU with Nick Land and this is very much both in the tradition of and sort of a send-up of Landian accelerationism. I haven't yet decided what I think of it or how seriously to take it; some portion of it is definitely a bit/gimmick but it's a really delightful gimmick (the physical book itself being tiny and cute is sort of emblematic here). Whatever it is, I'm really enjoying how it manages to be dense and obscure while simultaneously being really fun.
This interview with the authors tipped me over the edge to buying it after Amazon recommended it to me: https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-amy-ireland-maya-b-kronic-cute-accelerationism
ArmedTooHeavily
10d ago
you can only cut so much
Wrong.
ArmedTooHeavily
10d ago
Those conditions (likely) don't change the "amount" of self control you have, but they do change how much your desire to eat is weighted in the semi-conscious calculation of what you end up choosing to do. Self-control is your ability to over-ride unconscious, animal instincts in favor of conscious choices. In the case of a medical condition that makes you hungrier, it does in fact require more self control to not eat more, but that doesn't mean that it isn't ultimately a question of self control that determines whether or not you eat more.
ArmedTooHeavily
10d ago
There's a big distinction between obesity and poverty:
To become not-poor, you need to both do things you are currently not doing and do them in a way that gets other people to give you money for those things you do. You're adding behaviors, and you have to socially coordinate.
To become not-fat, you only need to not do a thing (eat). It requires no social coordination whatsoever, it requires no additional action, you literally only have to choose to not pick up the fork.
ArmedTooHeavily
10d ago
If you had perfect knowledge of the physical makeup of a human body and perfect knowledge of physics, you could perfectly predict the results of any input on that body, no need for cludging together predictions with meta-knowledge like what evolutionary pressures led to that physical arrangement of atoms. People are deterministic machines like literally everything else.
ArmedTooHeavily
11d ago
It is disproved on the grounds that humans are not machines
You are wrong in about fifteen different ways here, but I'll highlight this one: humans are in fact machines, just very complicated ones made out of meat.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Paradoxically, this happens in part because we don't spend enough on homeless shelters.
Nope. Absolutely fucking not. Not only will further subsidization just incentivize more homelessness, we have massively increased our homelessness spending concurrent with the homeless problem getting worse. We've run this experiment and it didn't work.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
As someone who lives in a city that's really gone to shit because of feral homeless, this kind of strawmanning is a pet peeve of mine. All that it would take to clean up the problems with the homeless is enforcing laws currently on the books. They harass somebody? Prosecute them. They jerk off in a library? Prosecute them. They dump out a garbage can on the sidewalk to look for reimbursable cans? Prosecute them. The problematic homeless are constantly committing crimes, JUST PROSECUTE THOSE CRIMES. That's all it would take!
I can't say that I would object too hard if my city adopted Judge Dredd rules and started executing vagrants, but there's no need for any tyranny at all besides the tyranny of basic law enforcement.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Marijuana legalization has been a disaster. We have ugly dispensaries and billboards everywhere and consumption of marijuana has skyrocketed. I don't even think it's reduced violent crime. Near me, in Seattle, the areas around dispensaries attract the worst people and there have been murders nearby.
As someone who lives in a weed-legal state (Oregon), I disagree with this. A couple reasons:
-
The weed market is currently crashing hard. The gold rush is over, dispensaries are failing left and right, and weed farms are hugely overproducing leading to incredibly low prices. In 5 years there will be a LOT less dispensaries, billboards, etc.
-
A significant cause of violence at dispensaries is that the bank/credit card companies will not service dispensaries because of federal laws. This means that dispensaries are forced to work in cash and that makes them juicy targets for robberies. There's nothing about weed stores that's inherently violence-causing besides this; even consuming the product makes you less violent. If the federal legal complications get cleaned up (aka we get federal legalization) most of the issues with crime and violence will dissolve. And it has, in fact, reduced violent crime by eliminating the black market trade.
That being said, I agree with Lomez about this more generally and am firmly against legalization of all other drugs (holy shit legalizing meth and opiates has been a disaster).
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
I would love to see a top-level comment laying out the arguments for all of these.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Well, at least he is definitely making it to Valhalla.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Very much agree. What, I wonder, have the two examples of the X-37 done in their cumulative decade in space?
ArmedTooHeavily
3mo ago
Distillation/mimicry is a lot cheaper than training from scratch, especially with access to logprobs (even only top-k logprobs), though the success metric for the student model is "how well it predicts the teacher model" not "how well it predicts the ground truth distribution".
If this were true (I certainly don't know enough to know if it is), it seems like it would open up massive opportunities for implanting hidden tells and and probably exploits in the models of anyone who aped your model.
ArmedTooHeavily
3mo ago
Effectively nothing happened on Jan 6th, though. There was a riot and it accomplished nothing.
ArmedTooHeavily
3mo ago
So do you agree or disagree with the base level argument "nothing happened"? Note that "They tried to make things happen, but they weren't successful" is not in disagreement with "nothing happened."
"It turns out cheap cotton was the most expensive product in the history of the earth" to quote Nick Land.
ArmedTooHeavily
3mo ago
I think it was significantly the latter. I've watched more than one writer get swallowed by the Twitter algo and more or less lose it. Martyrmade (Darryl Cooper) is a good example, and I'm glad he's focusing on making his next podcast and not tweeting much.
ArmedTooHeavily
3mo ago
This is worth remembering. National security concerns or whatever are important, but perhaps the horrors of war and the suffering of those forced to endure it is at least as important.
ArmedTooHeavily
3mo ago
very interesting, thanks.
Knowing nothing about this but your comment, it occurs to me that a combination of compartmentalization and Shulgen just being a kooky general could be sufficient. But also, you are right, there is a lot of unexplained weirdness that is insufficiently captured by "it's just disinfo."
ArmedTooHeavily
3mo ago
Your first (threat of non-gov entities getting the tech) is a good one, though imo not conclusive. Perhaps they made the bet that no one would shoot one down? Perhaps something about the tech makes them particularly hard to shoot down (this would align with the email's bit about "fly one over the white house").
Re your second: No, China could simply send a private communication to the US saying "FYI the thing that's about to happen over NJ is us", do something with the drones that would require the spooky tech (e.g. depending on what the tech actually is it could be to fly one into controlled airspace without being detected, to do otherwise impossible maneuvers, etc) and voila, effective show of force. You have to remember that we are not the intended audience, the US government is. This played out over and over during the cold war, there is lots of precedent for it.
While unique technology could be a signal, there is no evidence that a unique technology was used, because everything that has been verified is well within conventional COTS capabilities.
You emphatically do not know this. We know there were classified congressional briefings about the drones, so there is clearly information about these drones that is not public. It seems pretty obvious that if there were evidence of a classified technology being used, the government would prefer to keep that from the public.
You are right that the only evidence that we have that the drones were chinese is this one potentially mentally unwell guy. My point is simply that that theory does seem to fit all of the available facts and is possible.
ArmedTooHeavily
3mo ago
The B-21 almost certainly employs classified "novel propulsion systems", just like the B-2 did.
ArmedTooHeavily
3mo ago
If the US has unmanned fighter technology, why are they buying all these F-35s?
ArmedTooHeavily
3mo ago
"UFO" in the traditional sense (ostensibly alien spacecraft) has been used as a disinformation tactic since the late 40s. It worked at Roswell (which was, in fact, a crashed secret American balloon) so it got rolled into the strategies used to cover up secret military projects. I'm making up these percentages, but I'd say 75% of UFO sightings are totally banal misidentifications, 10% of them are outright fakes, 9% of them are unknown-to-the-public aircraft or other tech, and 1% are legitimately weird shit that nobody understands.
ArmedTooHeavily
3mo ago
Two things:
-
The email clearly says that the US already has the technology, and that China only recently attained it. So no risk of the US knocking down a drone and stealing the tech.
-
The entire point of the "show of force" in this case would be a demonstration that China has this novel propulsion system and can successfully deploy it over the US. "Why drop nukes on Japan, it would so much cheaper to just drop conventional bombs?"
Please do. IMO there's a huge Rickover shaped hole in the sort of broader rationalist/slatestarcodex universe, he's massively under-appreciated.
More options
Context Copy link