Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
No bio...
User ID: 1558
because if e.g. people living below the poverty line all suddenly stopped having kids child poverty would hit 0% very quickly.
I think your overall thesis is wrong because I don't think that preventing the lower strata from reproducing will actually improve the wellbeing of the next generation.
There has been much talk of "elite overproduction" previously: the proposition that much of the political malaise of the West lately (and, indeed, Ancient China before any of its periodic civil wars) comes from an oversupply of big-brain literati and an undersupply of prestige jobs to keep them from formenting revolution. Put another way: the economy needs Dalits; there must always be sewage janitors working on minimum wage. If the economy doesn't get it's Dalits through Dalit reproduction, it'll get 'em through cramming Brahmins into jobs that they feel are beneath them, which is WORSE for stability and prosperity than just letting the Dalits keep reproducing more Dalits.
We live in Omelas already. We need those miserable children. They cannot be excised from the makeup of society. Improving the objective quality of the lower strata will do nothing to improve their actual life-satisfaction and may even be counterproductive, because it'll not improve their relative economic condition but it WILL make them more resentful about it, and better at throwing pipe bombs at the higher strata.
If anything our best course of action is to Brave New World epsilon semi-moron them to be WORSE.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
6mo ago
If we can not train an LLM to reliably avoid saying bad words, how can we expect it to reliably not vote for bad laws?
Adhering to anti-racist parlance is harder than making good law, because anti-racist parlance is a logically incoherent moving target of whatever Current Thing the progressive stack is mad about today, whereas "Thou Shalt Not Murder" is pretty consistent.
Seems strange to me that labeling foreign funding for NGOs would be controversial and bad.
It's likely a "Who? Whom?" thing. If you're a Slovakian leftist and you notice that all the orgs you like and non of the orgs you hate are being shut down under this law, you may (reasonably?) conclude that the law was generated through 'Schelling gerrymandering': motivated rightists first finding a distinction between their orgs and yours, then claiming that it's a material difference when it actually isn't, in order to hurt leftists with plausible deniability.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
6mo ago
That wouldn’t even be a correct interpretation of MMT
Having a correct interpretation of MMT does not in my experience seem to be a necessary precondition of being an MMTer.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
7mo ago
Is there anything to this post beyond sneering at a member of the outgroup?
This isn't sneering at a member of the outgroup, it's policing the crazies of the ingroup.
Do not forget themotte.org's heritage, we're an offshoot of an offshoot of an offshoot of LessWrong. EA is kind of our great-aunt in terms of Internet genealogy.
If the government is truly dedicated to putting down a rebellion, then a well regulated militia isn't going to stop them. You might have guns, but military has more guns, and their guns are bigger.
"The government has jet fighters you can't fight them with handguns" is a favoured rhetorical flourish of gun-grabbers anywhere, and it is factually incorrect. AK-47s beat thermonuclear weapons. Because you don't have to kill their army to make occupation untenable, you just have to kill their tax collectors.
I accept that in the post-AGI world this is less clear though, simply because everything is less clear in the post-AGI world. I'm sure the AGI knows that the best way to clear out freedom fighters is with biological weapons, but the government should beware of Principal-Agent problems here: is the government's AGI really trying to help the government put down an insurgency, or is it trying to Kill All Humans?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
8mo ago
Women are more than half of our population but research on women’s health has always been underfunded.
He didn't say (or at least you didn't quote) "underfunded relative to men", he just said "underfunded". Is it not that he could have been speaking in an absolute rather than a relative sense?
*DISCLAIMER: I actually believe that his words should be seen as tribal applause lights and so fact-checking them is missing the point, but there you go.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
8mo ago
Any other incentives people can think of?
I think it's kinda "I want to get Biden reelected", but as a kind of epiphenomenal second-order effect. Even if you are not a leftist ideologue, you may perceive that your superiors / friends / funding board members are leftist ideologues, and you suspect you will get more social capital (or actual capital) if you tell these people what they want to hear, so you cherrypick your metrics in order that they show what these people want to hear, and, lo, "Statistics show the economy is doing great actually".
There was an opposite-valence situation in the UK a year or so ago, where the economic indicators were good but all the leftist journos were going "How can the economy be good under this Conservative Brexit government, they must be gaming the metrics somehow"?! Perhaps the civil servants who staff the Treasury Department / Office of National Statistics are just good at statistical brown-nosing, whatever country it is and whatever party's in power.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
8mo ago
Is the scale impractical? Is the expense impractical?
I'm pretty certain it's this? I get the sense that mass incarceration + deprogramming + filtering out fifth columnists would be about a million times more expensive than just shooting everyone. And also wouldn't work. Western governments at least try to filter their immigrants for "not psycho killers" but lo and behold, you still get machete beheadings and trucks of peace every other month on the streets of London & Paris.
Say what you want about just making political undesirables dig their own trench and then shooting them en masse in the back of the head a'la Katyn, but that is at least affordable.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
8mo ago
A close friend (Bob) is considering proposing to his girlfriend (Alice). Alice is an ex-prostitute. I am trying to talk him out of it.
By Bob's account (which I presume in turn is him parroting Alice's account), Alice's stint in the oldest profession was a regretted youthful indiscression perpetrated in her teens, for a couple of months. She wasn't groomed, she wasn't coerced, she wasn't doing what she had to do to feed her starving family: she was just horny and kinky and thought it would be hot. After it proved less hot than she anticipated, Alice got out of there and never did it again, and since had the 'normie' sex life of a 21st century young woman: (uncompensated) app hookups interspersed with long term monogamous relationships, most lately Bob.
My gut-level revulsion at the prospect of wife-ing a ho makes my effort to talk Bob out of it difficult, as my churning viscera limits my rhetorical strategy from being much more sophisticated than, in so many words, just yelling "CUCK CUCK CUCK" at him. Perhaps with a side of "If you're not part of the solution for deterring teen whorishness by making it's practitioners persona non grata in polite society, then that's how you get more teen whores".
I am wondering if the astute minds of The Motte can help me think up any more coherent arguments to deploy.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
8mo ago
He was in the equivalent of a supermax prison.
...in a country with a smaller economy than Italy's (notorious for losing mafia bosses from supermax). Russia can't afford to secure its jails from determined infiltrators.
The run-of-the-mill progressive does not consider striving and can-do attitudes an important part of success
Yeah, it's this. The median progressive thinks that "a pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality" is a bad-faith rhetorical device drempt up by right-wingers as an excuse to cut welfare. The progressive solution to black and/or female underachievement is affirmative action and redistribution, not inculcating a culture of grit and determination. Self-reliance is suspicious, not laudable, to them: believing yourself to be master of your own fate is heterodoxy to the left's no-man-is-an-island axiom.
They reiterate that the end result of the research is WORLD CHANGING. I'm sure it's worth bajilions of dollars. So if it's that valuable, just tell people what you're working on and what it's worth.
As a practicing academic research scientist, perhaps I can shed some light on this. The short answer is that no-one believes you when you say your end results will be world-changing, so good luck getting funding for even so much as a dinky thermal element radiator.
Scientific funding bodies are staffed by a mixture of know-nothing bureaucrats and ex-scientists turned people managers, neither of whom have seen the business end of a revolutionary scientific discovery for decades at best. No practicing scientist gets any money unless they can present these grey beancounters with colourful diagrams of massaged "preliminary results" which purport to show that a revolutionary discovery is Just One More Grant Award away: and so, cursed by the incentives foist upon them, practicing scientists have to enter a rat race of hyperbole, the end result being that everyone is claiming to be revolutionary at once. This in turn makes the beancounter's incompetence a self-fulfilling prophecy: their inability to assign monies to measured, meritorious proposals means no-one bothers writing measured, meritorious proposals, and the process devolves into a competition about who can spam the most outlandish over-promises, shiny diagrams, and ESG buzzwords. Making skepticism about revolutionary claims retroactively correct.
So the fact that scientists on top of a world-changing discovery are forced to rely on warm mercury backwash from a mine because no funding body will give them $1000 for a space heater is... extremely plausible to me.
EDIT: The above probably constitutes sanewashing. For the record I think the even more plausible explanation is that lazy showrunners didn't give it any thought beyond Corpos Bad, Hard Scientists Bad. The plot device actually does make sense, but my opinion of the show is sufficiently low that I think them correct only by accident.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
9mo ago
The critics had the whole season available to review.
And videogame journalists have the whole game to review, but a recurring feature of videogame reviews is that the reviewer obviously played a game with 100 hours of content for about 2 hours and then wrote their assignment.
People are lazy and cut corners in their jobs, c'est le vie.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
9mo ago
Not particularly easy to get through state legislatures, though. To actually pass an amendment it doesn't have to be popular with normies, it has to be popular with politicians.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
10mo ago
Just look at the most prominent recent examples: if you look at NT Times articles/their comment sections, you can see that the mainstream left's reaction to pro-Hamas protesters or the whole Claudine Gay affair
I think your examples of "the left policing their own" are not examples of that at all. Both of these are better understood as examples of the Israeli lobby policing US speech, not as examples of the mainstream left policing its own extremists.
Mapping the Palestine question as a typical intra-left issue and then generalising it to infer that the mainstream left is broadly reining in the extremists is a bad model. More convincing would be some prominent examples of BLM types or authoritarian covid-safetyists or mass immigrant activists, getting overruled by moderates. But I don't think you're gonna find 'em.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
10mo ago
More well-paid white collar jobs in the form of DEI officials.
This only kicks the can down the road, though. Whites can squeeze out one extra generation of PMC jobbing by jobbing specifically as agitators for their own replacement, but when their children come up against a hiring agent thoroughly steeped in the parents' propaganda, there'll be no cushy jobs for John Jr.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Offering to euthenize veterans when they have the temerity to complain that their wheelchair ramp is taking a long time to install is not what I'd call "who's diseases are really bad".
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
It seems the height of intellectual arrogance to think you can reliably predict which events currently in the news will never have any direct impact on your life in the future
Sounds like an isolated demand for rigour to me. Just because we don't have a 100% cast-iron lock on future prescience doesn't mean we can't make reasonable predictions. Adopting your attitude would make investing impossible, for example: the commodity might go down instead of up, just as the news might prove relevant rather than a nothingburger.
But being neither Muslim nor Jewish and having only one friend who's either, I struggle to think of a plausible conduit by which shenannegains in the holy land could ever become relevant to me.
And anyway, OP's complaint seemed not so much "this is irrelevant" as "this is pushing actually relevant stuff off the front page of the BBC", which I feel is a stronger argument. To almost everyone in Britain, this coverage is essentially bread and circuses: a bunch of flashy explosions which has the convenient by-product of distracting them from their real, non-News-Problems with fake (as in, fake relevance) News Problems.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Affirmative action means Whitey's oppression is not small, it's negative. Young Earth creationists at least have the valence of time correct!
It's really not any worse than various progressive ideas that are currently being pushed by academia
Exactly. Someone who believes the Earth was created in 7 days, 6000 years ago is substantially less dangerous (and, indeed, I would argue is substantially less delusional) than someone who believes whitey's oppression of minorities is the source of disparate racial outcomes.
EDIT: Apparently the new speaker believes both, so, heh, touché.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
I know the “Russian interference” or “Chinese interference” is a dumb conspiracy theory but if I were a KGB guy this is exactly the kind of outcome I’d be aiming for.
The countries that actually influence US policy prefer to direct the golem rather than render it inert.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Because it’s a man’s fault if women his own age refused to date him when he was younger?
Well... yes? The implication is (both from a broad feminist narrative and in this specific case) that if you can't get dates from women your own age, this is because they can see the red flags of your unsavoury character. The solution is therefore to Be Better and self-improve until women your own age DO want to date you. The solution is not to instead date inexperienced young things, these being the only things you can get, because their red flag detectors haven't grown in yet.
t. Man dating a woman 13 years younger than him right now.
What does the word "leader" mean? He leads, they follow.
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