FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
Maybe pick a woman worth running? Hillary was famously loathed by a large percentage of the country. Harris... an empty suit would have been an improvement.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
Hell, how much of this was made possible by Elon buying Twitter?
In my view, that's the big one. Without that, I'm pretty sure Trump doesn't win.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
"sure, sure, but if you use the middle letter of this book with this complex and arbitrary system of numerology, bam, you crack the whole thing wide open!"
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
Show me a time when she's dug in, bared her teeth, and defied the odds to fight for something, even once, anywhere. It's possible she has and I'm simply unaware, but from what I've seen of her, I rather doubt it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
What does a Harris loss look like?
She doesn't have the constitution, the character, or (going by reports) the personal charisma necessary to sustain a defiant stand. Blues do not have enough gas left in the tank to sustain a pivot to election denial at this late date. If Trump takes this, I think the reckoning might arrive in Blue-Land.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
Oh, certainly. Her poll was obviously motivated.
The obviousness escaped several posters here.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
Blacks declining to vote for Democrats in their usual percentages. An adaptation from "Brexit".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17d 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
17d 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
18d 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
18d 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
18d 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
20d 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
21d 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
21d 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
21d ago
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21d 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
21d 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.
Maybe you should try cutting a deal with the Right instead?
Progressivism lost its mind in 2014, and their excesses have done significant damage to our nation and its institutions. Maybe it's time to cut the crazier fringes loose, rather than bankrolling them at every turn. And if you can't do that, why should we on the Right consider you distinct from them?
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