Suffering is essentially just the unlearning gradient in an ML model. Any system that responds to external stimuli by altering itself to avoid repeating past behavior can suffer. Even a single neuron can suffer. Even a single atom can suffer.
That being said, I don't care about the suffering of neurons and atoms-- or plants, or animals, or basically anything except a few near-human species (apes, elephants, cetaceans, etc), pets I irrationally love, and of course humans themselves. AI could be smarter than me but I'm still not going to give a shit if it suffers except insofar as it experiences specifically human suffering.
GBRK
18d ago
One vibe I pick up from the modern vegans is that the anti-suffering ethics are the ethics of the future.
I hear people try to prognosticate ethics and I just laugh. The future will be bizarre and amoral in ways none of us can even comprehend. You will despise your great grandchildren, and they will despise you, for reasons you currently would consider totally baffling. And in the meantime, social ills that currently seem intractable will find themselves easily fixed by advancing technologies. I don't have any median prediction for the future, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like, "we discover the ability to reliably change someone's sexual and gender orientation with a pill and as a consequence the modern LGBT wars die down... and simultaneously, artificial wombs create an acrimonious civil war between the people who accept and reject the repugnant conclusion.."
GBRK
18d ago
"States issue citizenship" is a good enough framing that I won't dispute it. But there a particular bullet I'm interested to see if you're willing to bite: "children could only inherit citizenship from their parents" does not imply "children should inherit citizenship from their parents." You've done away with any entitlement noncitizen babies have to citizenship, but in the process also removed any entitlement citizen babies have to citizenship. Would you agree that if the state is to give out citizenship on exclusively a rational basis, presumably to reward pro-social behavior, there are plenty of reasons why it should also exclude a particular citizen's baby from also having citizenship? That doesn't violate the citizen's rights-- nowhere in the constitution is it enumerated that citizens have a right to have citizen babies. All the relevant text is about the born or naturalized individual's rights.
GBRK
18d ago
tbh that's part of why I don't believe in that current data adequately demonstrates the HBD thesis. If the HBD people are right about selective pressures leading to genetic differences we should expect heterozygote advantage to show up, but it doesn't. A -> means !B -> !A and all that. That's why I gave that whole list of disclaimers before I actually got into discussing the interesting-but-likely-false bit. But it would be fascinating, wouldn't it? My dad recently did a massive study of [telling you the crop might tell you my identity] genetics and it involved hybridizing modern elite genomes with a massive quantity of heirloom varieties from a seed bank to try and find useful alleles that were previously outbred while trying to look for local minima. If anyone wants to actually take HBD seriously they should be thinking of what an equivalent project looks like for humans, not trying to create a single inbred variety on the basis of... ???skin color???
Barring the AI apocalypse Americans will eventually evolve to be darker over large timespans anyways-- people living at our latitude always do. Sunscreen and indoor time will slow the selection effect but not eliminate it entirely.
GBRK
20d ago
Surely then you would need to assign first world citizenship to the entire planet?
In point of fact I do support open borders, so I wouldn't strictly rule out everyone else eventually getting citizenship. But citizenship comes with responsibilities as well as rights. Anyone who wants to come to America should. Anyone who wants to stay in America should contribute. The only reason to give any baby citizenship is because we assume that they will contribute to the common project of our nation. Now, I'm pretty darn sure that the median baby-- including the median immigrant baby-- is eventually a net-positive to america. But if I wasn't, I would advocate for increasing the responsibilities of citizenship until we could be confident that they eventually will be.
GBRK
20d ago
Ah yes, those socioeconomic factors that everyone "know[s]" are "massive."
We do, in fact, know empirically that SES affects IQ. You can't refute that just by using scare quotes.
thin US black kids are and how fat Vietnamese kids are
Childhood nutrition is a lot more complex than "calories in, IQ out." Culturally variable diets also impact development, and the western diet--particularly concentrated in poor westerners, including blacks-- is particularly bad. Plus, diet has epigenetic effects. It's not enough for your parents to be well-fed; relative to your genetics, you will grow up stunted if your grandparents weren't well fed.
Except the data inconveniently shows that "high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials,"
That exact blogpost proves that SES is a confound-- you can see the line going up for higher SES in blacks. Given the explicit and abundant evidence of existing confounds, the null hypothesis shouldn't be "assume blank-slatism by default, and everything we can't explicitly point to as coming from confounds must be because of genetics."
I would also not get too excited about interpreting "two or more races" underperforming whites (and moreso Asians) as evidence in favor of hybrid vigor and a desire to pwn the racists—since, for example, "two or more races" contains Asian-white mixes. It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size, something along the order of square root off the top of my head.
To be clear, the fact that evidence for hybrid vigor is shaky is evidence against genetic differences in racial IQ. If you'll let me use symbolic logic...
A: There exist race-based differences in genes that code for IQ B: When genetically distinct populations hybridize, hybrid vigor results. C: We observe hybrid vigor
A + B ⇒ C
So ¬C ⇒ ¬(A + B)
Therefore if C is false and B is true, that implies ¬A.
I'm aware that the following could be used as an argument against B:
It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size,
But also, I'm having hard time squaring that with the standard HBD viewpoint where racial differences in IQ are due to differential selection effects-- which presumably lead to roughly equal levels of mutational load overall (barring particularly inbred populations). If racial differences in IQ do exist, it would be as the result of selection for alleles (and novel mutations) that optimize for intelligence at the cost of some other trait, like the Ashkenazi Gaucher disease thing, but still bounded by other adaptions to local climate and food variations that sacrifice IQ for survivability in other ways. That's exactly the sort of thing that should cause intra-race susceptibility to heterosis as a function of masking deleterious alleles.
this interesting chart,
Huh, it's kind of funny seeing "US two or more races" way up there. I wouldn't rule out there being some difference in IQ-mediating genes between races because it would be extremely weird if there was net zero selection effects on intelligence everywhere, but I don't believe any current measure of estimating racial IQ differences is even close to accurate because nutrition + education + early childhood stability are known, massive confounds. That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage. Someone on the motte once suggested breeding brahmins and Ashkenazi's to see what would happen and I have to admit that it would be the funniest possible twist if actually mass immigration was because some secret society of benevolent galaxy-brained racists decided to take the idea of eugenicizing their way to peak human performance seriously, instead of constraining themselves to nazi dog show fanatic inbreeding retardation.
GBRK
22d ago
And that without skin in the game of some form
The children belongs, from birth, to the united states of america. They cannot renounce their citizenship without paying an exit tax. That is skin in the game. The phrase " entitling the child to benefits that might well be unavailable in the home country" is logically incoherent on its face because america is the child's home country. The child doesn't get any extra special bonus benefit for illegally immigrating-- the child is just an american citizen, and always has been, and gets no more or less liberty or responsibility than any other american citizenship.
And therefore creating benefits for the baby by necessity creates benefits for tge family that created the baby.
No. Not, "by necessity." As a practical measure. There's a difference. From the moment the child is born on American soil the USA arrogates the right to seize the child from their parents, put it in protective custody, and kick its parents out of the country. The USA doesn't usually do that because it rarely makes sense to force taxpayers to raise the child instead of its parent, but the right to do so exists, is sometimes applied, and is uncontroversially constitutional. (There are laws that limit how often the government does this in practice, but the very fact that they are laws, rather than amendments, is the proof in the pudding). Parents are not their children, and children are not their parents. Whether the parent has any right to be in the country has no bearing on whether the child has a right to be in the country-- the child's citizenship belongs to them and them alone. Abrogating someone's rights based on the behavior of their relatives is simply not compatible with an individualist, democratic state.
GBRK
22d ago
I'm aware of that-- pending confirmation that I actually understood Crowstep's position and we weren't just talking past each other, I planned to argue that assigning people special hereditary rights is fundamentally incompatible with democratic civilization and the notion that "all men are created equal".
GBRK
22d ago
The gist of your argument is, "illegal immigration is bad. Receiving the benefits of having a citizen child is good. If we link the latter to the former we are giving people good things for doing bad things. This is unjust." I disagree with the premise (illegal immigration is better than legal immigration because they have to pay taxes but don't get welfare), but admit that it's logically sound. It's also, however, missing the point. Birthright citizenship isn't about the immigrant, it's about the baby. Yes, those children benefit from schools and healthcare-- but so do the children of american citizens. Neither the child by blood nor the child by soil have a "right" to that education or healthcare, but we as a society have pragmatically and compassionately decided to invest in our children in the (well founded) hope that they will one day repay the favor. And in the meantime, we expect our children-- of citizens and noncitizens both-- to earn their rights to vote and run for office, as delimited by the laws that make explicit our social contract.
If you think that education or healthcare are bad investments, you're welcome to argue for that. If you think that illegal immigrants should receive fewer benefits for giving birth to citizen children, you're welcome to argue that too. If you think our social contract asks for too little in return for too much.... well, I'm already pretty sympathetic to that position. But that's all orthogonal to my argument that blood confers no special qualities relative to soil.
GBRK
22d ago
It obviously does and these children legally are entitled to it. I'm saying that they shouldn't be.
I think you believe that citizenship is an entitlement that belongs to the parent, rather than the child, and that they distribute it according to their will. In that model, it would make sense to say that, mechanically, "giving a child citizenship" is equivalent to "giving their parent the right to make their children citizens." Consequently, you perceive birthright citizenship as a reward to illegal immigrant parents.
Is that accurate?
GBRK
22d ago
It's deeply physical.
Implying that dirt isn't? Implied that a people aren't tied together by living together in the same place? This entire argument is 100% special pleading.
GBRK
23d ago
Illegal immigrants (quite rationally) do treat first world citizenship as a prize and lie and cheat their way to getting it.
Even if I were to accept that description of illegal immigrants as being accurate, it still fails to describe the children of illegal immigrants. Babies are not rewarded by citizenship, they are entitled to it.
It's crazy to criticize magic soil when apparently you believe in magic water. Having a particular genetic sequence or ancestral tree doesn't establish responsibilities and liberties any better than touching a particular patch of soil. Actually, it is explicitly, legally worse at transmitting those things.
GBRK
23d ago
Surely, justice demands there must be some quantity of sweat expended over some period of time before we recognize a deep tie of kinship and mutual responsibility?
the way you're asking this question conflates the mother and child, but that's the very point I'm arguing against. Certainly, the mother has only expended a very limited amount of sweat relative to what they've produced over their entire life-- but the child, at that point, has given literally everything they have to america. Even then, it's fair to say that we want another 18 years of sweat out of them before we extend them any greater liberty than the right to exist on our soil, just as we do for the children of legal inhabitants. Dipping my toe into the child-separation debate, I concede that it makes sense to say, "either leave the child with CPS or renounce its American citizenship to take it with you when you're deported." I'd disagree with that policy on practical/utilitarian grounds, but deontologically find the position blameless.
GBRK
23d ago
Framing citizenship as a "reward" is completely nonsensical. Citizenship is the codified form of the chains of responsibility and liberty that bind individuals and their communities together. Whether someone is born to illegal parents has no bearing on whether they dutifully maintain those chains. You're correct that dirt isn't magic, but you're completely ignoring the fact that blood isn't either-- citizens by Jus Sanguis don't have an intrinsically stronger claim. Rather, it's mundane, ordinary, sweat that ultimately cements the body politic together, and the children of illegal immigrants donate plenty of theirs. Understanding that, America grants them their citizenship without regard for the the sins of their fathers. And that would be the right, and just, and honorable way to do things even if illegal immigrants and their children weren't an economic net positive.
(I could accept the argument that America shouldn't extend citizenship to people who don't work or pay taxes in america. But only if you apply it globally and say that at the minimum America should ban dual citizenship for everyone, and at maximum all expats should be given nansen passports.)
GBRK
24d ago
I feel like Aella unleashed a sort of Rule 34 for gimmicks: there is no niche so stupid that some e-thot won't try to exploit it.
In a weird way I kind of respect it. Blogging while being an e-thot is an argument from ethos-- it's the opposite of self-censorship, and presents you as someone with no need to tell reputation-preserving lies. Call it the Milo Yiannopoulos phenomenon: being visibly and openly a member of the "outgroup" of a particular ideology makes you that much more credible when speaking about it.
GBRK
25d ago
A high number of FTMs I've known have at least stated they're autistic
Yeah, that's part of the reason why I'm only assigning a 1-5% probability of this being true. I could come up with an argument along the lines of, "autistic women do better with men than schizoid women" but that has its own problems.
GBRK
25d ago
Part of this satisfaction could also be gaining a new social group.
Yep, that's what I'm addressing with the
and joining a dedicated community
bit. The autism compensation culture is my explanation for why they join the "trans" group specifically. Sure, they can join a wargaming group and have fun with fellow autists, but reinforcing autistic behavior makes the social deficits in the rest of their life worse. trans groups, meanwhile, teach them to be pro-social at least when dealing with LGB people and white liberals.
I think that this "estrogen cures autism" analysis is false, for the simple reason that this reads like confirmation bias and (ironically) an attempt to systematize the effects of estrogen in a way directly counter to any notion of the author becoming less autistic. That being said, I'd assign something like a 1-5% chance that they're onto something, and that something would be really interesting if it was true, so for a bit I'm going to be arguing from that perspective.
Before anything else, let me establish that the "problem" with autism is difficulty communicating .That predictably leads to social deficits and-- guess what-- trans people report high levels of social isolation and loneliness (This figure includes FTM trans people too, which aren't what I'm talking about with autism, but I'll get to that later). Meanwhile, estrogen increases oxytocin and oxytocin reducing autism symptoms and oxytocin decreases the felt impact of social isolation. So immediately, there's a pretty compelling link between autism->feeling lonely->taking estrogen->feeling better that explains the "success" of the trans phenomenon, including the high rates of treatment satisfaction. This blog post goes one level deeper, and proposes an autism-schizoid axis that underlies the taking estrogen-feeling better link... and additionally, explains why trans people feel better even without taking hormones. Namely, if their problem is an excess of autistic traits, even just adopting the cultural behavior of a more schizoid culture is enough to make up for part of their social deficits-- and joining a dedicated community focused on doing the same thing reinforces that effect even further.
FTM trans people don't really make sense if you assume that autism compensation is the mechanism of action for transsexualism, but with the autism-schizoid axis they start to make more sense... being schizoid causes it's own form of social deficits that presumably testosterene helps compensate for. We know that testosterone encourages altruistic behavior under certain circumstances... I'm not sure how that would help it counter schizoid personalities, but it's certainly suggestive of something going on.
Put all that together with the fact that transexualism has increased pretty much in tandem with the simultaneous rise of autism/ADHD diagnoses and hormone disruptors like phthalates, microplastics, high fructose corn syrup, etc. and you can put together a comprehensive, self-consistent explanation for why this entire social movement in happening.
Again, I don't actually believe the article. Even if the author is right, I think their methodology is so wrong as to be useless. But it is interesting, and for that I have to respect it.
GBRK
29d ago
It's worth remembering one critical fact:
Owning nukes changes the strategic calculus away from conventional... But dramatically tilts it towards nuclear war. Because if you have nukes, suddenly it becomes reasonable for any hostile country to perform a counterforce first-strike to destroy your nukes before you could use them. The existing members of the nuclear club have conventional militaries and/or alliance networks of such size as to makke that unappealling... But an isolated, belligerent ghaddafhi might have actually lead to the destruction of libya in nuclear fire.
GBRK
1mo ago
Something I've never been clear on is how this dynamic is controversial
The long run dynamics are less clear cut because immigrants also demand goods and services and also start businesses, and density + cluster effects produce economic efficiencies that lead to long-run economic growth and therefore employment. The even longer-run dynamics are even less clear cut... Sometimes thanos-snapping your workforce ends in the economic productivity growth after the black plague. Sometimes it ends in the permanent economic slump of eastern europe.
GBRK
1mo ago
Not an argument, but I have a hard time accepting that the "bomb iran" people are working in good faith from solid natsec principles-- because the majority of rabidly pro-israel partisans I've met are republican and therefore at least defacto ukraine-skeptic. Like, I can intellectually understand that there are honest to god neocons out there voting for Holden Bloodfeast whenever possible, and in principle I sympathize quite a lot with them. But they seem to occupy very, very little of the media environment I'm exposed to. Pairing that with my supreme lack of faith in the current administration, I have this kneejerk response that any ammunition we're throwing into the middle east is probably being wasted compared to the alternative option of putting it into Ukrainian stockpiles.
Maybe that's how the fight looks like in the next 5-10 years, but again, I think you're being insufficiently imaginative. Imagine instead a realignment so that the feuding sides are, "people should keep the sexual orientation and felt gender identity they're naturally predispositioned to" versus "we should precisely schedule changes in sexual and gender organization across several developmental thresholds to create well-behaved citizens." Something utterly bizzare, like making every kindergartener a girl so that they all play peacefully, then transitioning people to man or woman based off which educational track they used, combined with making people gay during their early teens so they don't have accidental pregnancies, but making them EXTREMELY straight going into adulthood to make sure their parents get grandchildren.
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