FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
Blacks declining to vote for Democrats in their usual percentages. An adaptation from "Brexit".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
I don't think anyone claims that 'men can be women' per se.
If I find examples of people who do appear to be claiming that men can be women per se, would you change your mind? For example, people who insist that someone who was universally regarded as a man ten years ago is in the present a woman, without qualifiers?
More generally, intellectual embroidery is, I think, how the transition from "kooky" to "consensus" is achieved. Reality contains infinite, fractal complexity; we emphasize or elide that infinite complexity as needed to conform what we see to what we think.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
Again, do you laugh at Simulation Theory? It used to be a reasonably high-status talking point in the rationalist community.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
Why are apparently cooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right?
Left-wing kooky beliefs aren't apparent, because it's the consensus narrative that supplies the "kooky" label, and they still maintain a nearly arbitrary degree of control over what the "consensus" is. "Men can be women" was an astonishingly kooky belief five minutes before you could get fired for disagreeing with it.
"Why is this thing I've been told I must laugh at so incredibly laughable?" Do you laugh at Simulation theory too?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
Militias? Sure, that’d count. Those are awfully few and far between.
If we define "militia" as "organized to the point that the people committing the violence have defined, articulatable responsibilities in managing how the violence is implemented", that doesn't seem rare to me over the last decade. "you three hit people, these two "intervene" once you've gotten a few licks in, these two are on medic duty, you guys run interference with anyone trying to record the action..." I've been observing something like that pattern since 2015/2016 at the latest.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
I think Trump will win. Weak confidence.
If Harris wins, I think we'll see a serious attempt at immigration amnesty within her first term. Moderate confidence.
If Harris wins, I think Trump will probably receive a prison sentence. Moderate confidence.
If Harris wins, I think Trump will make some attempt to challenge the legitimacy of the election. Moderate confidence.
Over the next year, polling will measure significant decreases in trust in the Federal government, the media, and Elite institutions generally. Extremely high confidence.
Posts I didn't get to prior to the election, in no particular order:
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Retrospective on whether Hunter Biden was selling access to Joe, and on whether Joe Biden was cooperating with the sale, how this was investigated by the authorities and the press, and how we talked about it here over time.
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Retrospective on Jan 6th, comparing the arguments we had on the day to the information that's come out since.
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Path-Dependence as an expression of institutional decay: Public Trust in elections and institutions, Democratic Party presidential candidate selection, hopefully other examples.
Alright, let's back up a step.
Fix what?
There's a problem where our current system of elites take a thing, fuck it up beyond all belief, and suffer zero consequences. I've mentioned the Boeing space program as an example, but we could use education or the economy or the criminal justice system or the twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan. This problem has gotten pretty bad, to the point that it is at least arguably jeopardizing the stability of our nation. That's the fix I and I think other people here are claiming is needed.
Sure, we need elites. There's always going to be a need for talented leadership. But I think there's a pretty strong argument that our current leadership is not in fact talented. And it seems to me that the problem isn't just that they're "hit or miss". The problem is that they've demonstrated that they can consistently miss for multiple decades running with zero consequences for them and disastrous consequences for us.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
One of the things that alienates educated Westerners from Trump is the way that he talks. He hardly ever talks in abstract terms. He doesn't qualify or hedge; everything is direct and concrete. [...] He can't just say that people like Liz Cheney send people into warzones but will never face any real danger themselves, but rather he makes that idea concrete by describing [EDITED] her being pushed onto the frontlines to face death against an overwhelming force.
seems like you're reading this as about what he said, not as an example of how he talks. it's the later, so the correction on what he said doesn't change the point.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
The information environment is fraught, and time and effort are not unlimited. It doesn't seem all that different from using wikipedia to me; you're trading hallucination risk for deliberate deceit risk. It's a way of getting a provisional "normie" answer from which to proceed. It looks to me like the information was reasonably accurate, and if it isn't, we can generally rely on Cunningham's Law to secure a correction.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
Elon Musk is technically is an elite and has contributed greatly to society.
Which is the more central example of our Elites as a class: Musk, or the management of Boeing? Would you say that Boeing has demonstrated a solid track record of solving difficult problems?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
The OP contains a section explicitly using a chatbot to get a "default answer" to a technical question. That seems like a legitimate use of AI to me, not "padding out the word-count", but apparently @TequilaMockingbird disagrees.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
They might not be giving me the whole story, but I can generally be confident that they’re not telling me a made-up story.
How many examples of "average politicians" telling made-up stories would be required to shift your prior here? "Putin is blackmailing Trump with tapes of him being urinated on by Russian Prostitutes" and "Russia hacked election machines in 2016 to secure a Trump victory" and "The Hunter Biden laptop is a Russian disinformation campaign" are three obvious examples of made-up stories promulgated by those you seem to be classifying as "average politicians", and they were not even "directionally" correct. I am pretty sure that I could add dozens more examples from the last few years with minimal effort.
I would rather a politician tell me something true but incomplete/misleading, rather than tell me something false but directionally correct.
It seems to me that, moving beyond questions of aesthetics, this preference grounds out on quantifiable concrete outcomes. That is, we can actually look at population-level beliefs, and we can track those population-level beliefs to the statements of political actors that formed and broadcasted the message that gave rise to them.
This is one of my favorite graphs. It's a measure of population-level beliefs about an objective, factual question of immediate and undeniable salience to the political realities of our nation. It seems to me that the shape of this graph was directly created by the "normal politician" style of discourse which you are arguing for, and the consequences were likewise quite direct: a massive increase in violent crime nation-wide. More damningly, it seems trivial to me to demonstrate how obvious "made up stories" spun off and achieved virality directly from those "normal politician"-style claims.
What I see in that graph is an obvious example of a completely compromised epistemic environment, one where the center of gravity of the consensus narrative is completely detached from objective reality. And it seems to me that such epistemic compromise is hardly an isolated occurrence, and is in fact the norm across much of the policy space, from foreign affairs to educational policy to gun politics to abortion to the status of the federal bureaucracy and so on. If one accepts that broad epistemic corruption as a given, I'm at a loss to understand why you prefer the style that produces such woeful outcomes.
So there's an official in ancient Japan, sharp as a tack, a real up-and-comer. He's rapidly making his way up the imperial bureaucracy, and his rivals decide they need to nip him in the bud. The capitol is overrun with pickpockets, has been forever; the crimes are too trivial for serious punishments, and yet no lesser punishments seem to dissuade the criminals. So they decide the thing to do is to give him the job of cleaning up the pickpocket problem, and then when he fails to do so, they can quash his career.
He accepts the job, thinks it over, and issues a new imperial statute: pickpocketing is now legal, provided the pickpockets obtain and carry an official license from the government while plying their vocation. This license is a large placard, five feet tall and two wide, with the word "pickpocket" written on it in large letters visible at a considerable distance. Pickpocketing without a license is now not just pickpocketing, but violation of the imperial law, a crime punishable by death.
The pickpockets examine their options, up-stakes and relocate elsewhere. The official's career proceeds unimpeded.
Because it's boring and cheap.
Calling for it is definitely boring and cheap. An actual collapse of civil order would be a lot of things, but "boring" and "cheap" are not among them. If you think that our current order would obviously have survived Trump catching the Butler bullet with his brainstem, you are much more of an optimist than I. I believe that a lot of Americans were genuinely disappointed that the bullets only killed and wounded his supporters and not Trump himself. Would you disagree?
The taboo on organized political violence has been steadily degrading for at least the last decade. We've had multiple presidential and federal assassination attempts within the last few years, numerous politically-motivated shootings, and at least one politically-motivated spree-killing of children. This would be catastrophic if the capacity for organized violence were a constant in the equation, and only the willingness were increasing. And in fact, the commenter above fervently believes this, as do most people, and so is actively working to maximize the willingness variable. And on the flipside, most people discounting the possibility of a serious collapse are likewise assuming capacity as a constant and reasoning from there.
He and all others who share this perspective are deceived. Not only is capacity a variable, it is a variable freighted by a massive overhang of untapped potential energy. The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for the best ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. The further the culture war escalates, the more motivated the search. If nothing changes, that search is very likely to, within the next few years, return results that are unsurvivable for our present society.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
I recall a discussion of "((( )))" use trigging and auto-admin response).
We had a Russian regular here by the name of Ilforte. Really interesting guy, quite prolific. The russian language apparently uses these weird double-parens-looking symbols rather than quotation marks, and some newbie mistook them for the triple-parens "echo marks" of infamy. Someone else responded explaining the difference, saying, "these:[wierd unicode double parens things] are russian quote marks, these: "((())) are triple parens, it's a different thing."
The reply explaining the difference got flagged for anti-semitic content by the reddit admins.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20d ago
Glad to help. But your claim was that Trump killed that movement, and as I pointed out above, it actually killed itself. Trump did not discredit foreign interventionism; his predecessors did that for him. Trump did not discredit fiscal responsibility; his predecessors did that for him. Trump did not establish that personal character is irrelevant in the presidency; his predecessors did that for him. He is the effect, not the cause, and it seems to me that you are speaking as though this all could have gone some other way, if only his supporters had possessed the necessary moral fortitude.
If you want to argue that foreign interventionism was a sound policy, by all means, take the floor. If you want to argue that the fiscally-responsible promised land was just over the next hilltop in 2016 or even right now, by all means make your case. But it seems to me that you are painting the GOP elite with virtues the historical record cannot remotely support. They lost, and they lost for concrete, obvious reasons. What benefit is derived from ignoring or papering-over their failures?
Foreign interventionism made a hell of a lot more sense when we were fighting the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is gone, and you think nothing should have changed? Why?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20d ago
It's easy to blame bullshit on your political opponents, but it's hard to offer any realistic alternatives.
Here's one off the top of my head: If the store catches you stealing, they can beat the shit out of you with a stick, and we collectively agree to, at most, tut-tut about it. I note that this solution arises organically without the need for any government intervention at all, and in fact significant government intervention is needed to stop it from instantiating itself.
It should go without saying that this is not the ideal way to do things. It seems pretty clear to me that it still, heh, beats the scenario you're offering where thieves are allowed to steal without consequence because it's just too much paperwork otherwise. If your message is that the law is so sclerotic that basic rules like "don't steal shit that doesn't belong to you" cannot be enforced, then my reply is that the law in its present form has outlived its usefulness.
The obviousness escaped several posters here.
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