Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
Hello back frens
User ID: 2022
From a purely biological point of you foo and bar are propably pretty similar. Both are a person having AIDS. If this is accurate, the relevant difference between foo and bar is moral, not biological. Both involve getting infected with HIV, but in the foo case, the effected person is sexually oriented towards getting infected and participated willingly, and so its fine. In the bar case, the effected person is unwilling, so its bad.
So, should your purely apolitical taxonomy of mental physical disorders classify foo as a mental illness, or should it refuse to classify bar as a mental illness?
When the FTX thing happened recently and people argued about consequentialist justifications for lying, I realised Scotts theory of categories literally cant tell the difference between the truth and the highest-utility-thing-to-say. Now, he doesnt seem to know this. He thinks that:
There are facts of the matter on each individual point – whether a whale has fins, whether a whale lives in the ocean, whether a whale has tiny hairs, et cetera. But there is no fact of the matter on whether a whale is a fish. The argument is entirely semantic.
But thats not how it works. If tomorrow the Ministry of Hide-tanning decides that whale skin is hairless, you might insist that it obviously has hair, I mean look at it (possibly with some magnification). But they could just as well say "Well, there are facts on each individual point - whether they hold water, whether they resist against the grain, whether theyre made of ceratin, etc. But theres no fact to the matter whether theyre hairs."
More generally, "X falls in category(set) Y" and "X has property Z" are isomorphic - everything you can express in the first form, you can also express in the second, and vice versa. If "is a fish" really were just semantic, then by the same mechanism "has tiny hairs" would be just semantic. So there would be no facts based on which you can classify things.
The only thing that makes this theory remotely workable is that you already know which things you want to apply it too. Its pure Humpty-Dumpty-ism in practice.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I do identify as a "secular humanist" at times, and I think I do have a fairly solid foundation within that tradition. The problem is, that it's a fairly iconoclastic, aniconic life path.
(From the top-level)
It's superficial, but I've sometimes envied devout Christians the way I envy superfans on Tumblr. Like, sure there's a lot of weird restrictions their devotion creates, but I wish I cared as much about God or Star Wars as these people seem to.
I would say that Enlightenmentism does care this much, just about something thats not so concrete. I mean, would a normal person write stuff like this:
I was just there for warm fuzzy feelings, because they had a reliable package for eliciting a psychological state I otherwise have trouble achieving. The Hare Krishna's may be against intoxicating substances, but for a brain like mine they have a powerfully ecstatic intoxicant at the core of their practice, and I wanted to be warmed by it without getting burnt.
No, its really quite a small group that thinks like this. Even starting from the water-supply in the West, this takes years of intentionally reshaping your mind. Unfortunatly it also involves thinking that the shape of mind achieved is standard, unremarkable, characterised mainly by absences, so you dont really appreciate it.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I mostly agree.
nor any interesting non-additive effects
I dont know what people have with non-additive effects. In a highly polygenic trait, non-additive effects of genes are hard to detect because theyre almost certainly irrelevant even if real.
Would they be better off – in the expected direction of less dysfunction – than the baseline, or rather, than random implanted embryos? You can bet on it.
That is mostly what I expect as well. Im just saying that theres a lot more evidence that it "might as well be" IQ/genetics, than that it actually is.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
One example for what this could look like is low mutational load: Its also correlated with all the good things, including IQ, and certainly causally upstream of it. Genetic IQ enhancement in a narrow sense wouldnt fix that, and if it has any effects not mediated by IQ (it almost certainly does), you wouldnt get those, whereas currently they strongly correlate with IQ. Now, in this case, if you know about it and are already doing genetic enhancements, its easy to fix that as well. But there could be more things like this.
Basically, noone has run an RCT on IQ increases, because we havent been able to do them.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Poor areas are not awful because of tragic dirt; they are awful because they are filled with stupid, violent, impulsive people.
Yes, but its not clear IQ 120 by itself would fix that. Genetic enhancement would be a thus-far-impossible level of decoupling between intelligence and other correlates of good outcomes, it might break currently observed correlations.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
How to Win Friends and Influence People: the Rationalist Edition
At this point, reading
an articlea comment like this one, you already know what the next “narrative beat” has to be.
The fact that this has to be the next narrative beat in an article like this should raise red flags. Another way of phrasing “this has to be the next narrative beat” is that it’s something we would believe / want to believe / insert at this place in our discourse whether it was true or not. That means we need to be on extra special good epistemic behavior when we try to consider whether it’s true in this individual case, understanding that we’ll have a strong bias towards assuming “yes” that needs to be counteracted.
So I checked your points against both the latest 7 top-levels in the thread 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and my memory of popular comments.
Extreme (emotional) Decoupling.
Not true of any of the top-levels. Some popular comments are like this but some are also earnest presentations of a situation that doesnt fit any mayor narrative, or being vocally angry at the outgroup.
Long, internally consistent logical chains based on premises with monstrous error bars/uncertainty
Not true of any top-levels nor of popular comments. Long arguments tend to make their points in more detail rather than make more points. Including multible examples for something. Adding visceral details to a situation youre asking people to consider. Countering first-order objections. Even just repeating yourself in different words. Very long comments mostly invest in parallel rather than serial argumentation.
Literature references.
Not true of any of the top-levels. Occasionally in popular comments.
Write like a high-schooler who just discovered the wonders of a thesaurus.
True of one of the top-levels, and I would guess a similar rate for popular comments. I think the author of that one top-level is ESL and that probably contributes. Then again so am I, so maybe comments that dont seem pretentious to me (or my own) do seem that way to natives.
Why post a succinct list with references when you can write a 30,000 character multipost that is a struggle to get through?
Not true of any of the top-levels. Popular comments are sometimes very long and a struggle to get through, but its not clear that they could be effectively shortened into a list of references. The last multipost I remember is this, if you want to try at compression. Its also built around a literature reference and has a pretty decoupled premise, but its doesnt seem bad to me.
...respond to people with a half dozen links to your corpus of 10,000 word posts amounting to a small novella for them to read!
OK I think at this point there are two people doing this and only one of them where you actually find it annoying.
Complain about the normies in academia, MSM, HR, government, your life, etc vocally and frequently. This communicates that you're smarter than them, and remember, criticism is always easier than defending a thesis or building something worthwhile and thus disproportionately easier for gaining status.
Depending on how you count it, up to 4 of the top-levels. Id say one of them is mainly about that. It seems hard to avoid criticising academia, MSM, HR, or government in CW posts, and "normies" doesnt restrict the description very much. I think this is actually a bit less common/intense in popular comments.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Except...if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be?
And if you could say it out loud and you just dont, thats somehow cooler? Because the point of themotte is that there is a way to make a claim overtly. All the cases I can think of when some "darkly hinting" got popular in ratspace is when "You wouldnt understand it even if I said it out loud, because its so hard to explain and/or understand" like TLP or the meditation guys.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Re the first part, I think your reasoning here depends on the directions orthogonal to beauty still corresponding relatively closely to terms in which we normally think about art.
the SF Federal Building, the Toronto subway sketches and the MLK Embrace statue all achieve their hideousness in unique ways, and all seem to strive toward various other indicia of elite art
Do I read correctly that you think its possible to make something thats clearly art of our current elite and also beautiful?
We also hear that beauty is consumerist, looks cheap, is reactionary, means embracing an aesthetic of a white supremacist past, etc
What did you have in mind with "looks cheap"? Are there really people who would say e.g. the Lincoln memorial looks cheap?
"Reactionary" here means basically the same thing I did with "fascist", and the association with bad old times is somewhere between made up and self-fulfilling, so it cant be the cause of the dislike.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I think the barberpole theory is pretty lame.
First of all, it doesnt actually tell you what new thing the upper classes will adopt. Before modernism, public art and architecture was neoclassical. If I had asked you at that time what style one could adopt to best differentiate from neoclassical, would you have come up with modernism or postmodernism from first principles? I think the best answer there would have been imitating rural peasants, but its hard to say. In practice a "style" has lots of attributes, and giving an exact inverse is difficult and also unnecessary, because anything thats different enough cam be used as a repudiation.
And "obvious inversion" is only one way this could go. Another example that certainly seems to be true often is that only the people youre signaling to can read the signals. If this is "elites compete for adulation of their peers", that doesnt explain the uglyness. It only needs to be obvious if you want to show the proles that youre different from them.
Also, theres a lot of low-class coded things that lower-class people themselves dont consider beautiful. Consider for example these very loose-cut shirts littered with branding: The people who wear these like them, and they think theyre cool, but they dont think theyre beautiful. You have to really scrape the bottom of the barrel to find people who e.g. wear them to a wedding. Returning to the topic of public art, I have yet to see anyone argue we should have e.g. a statue of Mickey Mouse in public square. Why not? Mickey Mouse figures are certainly more popular home decoration than classical statuettes.
So, its not given that the lower classes will even dislike it, if public buildings and art are distinctly higher-class. I dont think postmodern art is an obvious consequence of post-scarcity. Theres plenty of people floating around telling us that things shouldnt be beautiful because thats fascist: consider taking them seriously.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I forget the quote and context completely, but the gist is that you can recognize intelligence below your own, but not above.
It actually says that it does extend above a bit:
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Why would you need to be trans for this? You can just not care about your appearance and not spend time with the chick cliques. If youre enough of a nerd to be on here youve probably seen a few girls like that.
Interesting topic in a thread below
Consider: a society of just downies and Henrys* wouldn't even be a society, while a society of Enron, Google, and AXA is just ... our society.
A society of my aunt and Henrys would necessarily devolve into hunter gatherers who would be in a precarious position.
A rival hunter gatherer society of entirely Enron, Google and AXA professionals would be a tribe that my retarded aunt and Henry with comparable numbers of similar nature would probably subjugate easily, eventually integrating violent strong men or wise old women, humiliating the rest in servitude.
I think this is probably a point of disagreement for many here and so worth discussing on its own. I see two larger topics that this could become a test for: One is the model of "general competence"/IQ maximalism, expecting successful people to be successful at ~everything, vs a tradeoff between abstract thinking and practical or social skills. Second, whether our current elites are in some sense a paper tiger - bullshit jobs, Overcredentialism, etc.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Yes, but that doesnt mean its true. Black activism has always mostly looked how progressivism at the time thought it was supposed to look, and its successes were mostly given to them by white people either directly or by giving them things that materially imply them.
I mean, if our elites decided that riots will no longer be tolerated, what do you think happens? You of all people should know better than to think a reverse of the old race relations could really happen.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
You ask «Why would one choose to identify as a powerless victim», but the crux is that if you don't have systemic power, you don't get to choose your identity
or fight for the slice of the pie the collective identity you have been defined into gets.
Do you think blacks got their current status in western society by "winning" it from whites?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Why there wasn't really a fight over trans men joining isn't really the point, I think. I'm arguing that trans men don't get any privileges by acting like cis men.
Those are the same point. They dont get any privileges that way because they already had them as women. If theres any advantages to being a man, weve gotten outraged about and tried to eliminate them a while ago.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
But is the broadening of the accepted reasons really a problem? Assume for a moment that puberty blockers worked as advertised (no interference with normal desistance processes). Is there something inherently wrong with offering kids who are experiencing discomfort with their gender puberty blockers? One might argue that categories like non-binary or genderqueer don’t exist and are artificially created for ideological reasons, but if they do, I’m not sure what the issue is.
Whats the scenario here? So you have kids who have some sort of gender problem but dont want to transition, and you give them puberty blockers. If nothing changes about their gender situation, what then? Do they just keep taking blockers permanently? I mean, progressivism making people literally not grow up is funny as an idea, but probably not so funny if it actually happens.
And if you dont start out with the idea that normal development is the "good outcome", why would it be a problem if they interfere with desistance? At most you can say that trans people end up less happy. But hypothetically that could change, and the interference remain the same.
The simpler explanation would be that trans women attracted more scrutiny, so of course people who declared themselves to be pro-trans focused on touching women and female-related terms. Trans men don’t seriously threaten men in the same way, and good luck trying to start a mens-rights movement which might be threatened by them.
There are more arguments Joyce makes for the preservation of single-sex (basically only women’s) and the dangers of allowing trans women to enter those spaces, but they’re not very interesting or worth expounding on. If you understand the argument that males tend to be more violent, especially sexually, towards females, you’ve read about a dozen or so pages in this book already.
The feminism is getting in the way of the analysis here: Men dont worry about transmen because whatever they could do was already done by normal women. They demanded to be included in previously male-only spaces, and that those change to accomodate them. But this goes back to "The only allowed reason to not like someone is that hes evil", and so she has to claim this is about violence.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Similarly, the number of people moving into a city will be upper bounded by some multiple of the number of salaried jobs that the city can support.
And it historically kept being met. In the 1980s people randomly decided that cities around the world were 'full'. By what mechanism did the degree of fullness get determined and why stop at this arbitrary time in the late 20th century ?
The 80s were the inflection point of an economic change, where now the number of salaried jobs increases as the people in the city increase. In the old days, a city would be built around a resource, often a trade route, that had some absolute size of economic surpluss to be extracted. There were jobs for the people extracting it, those brought people in, then there were jobs for services for those people, which brought more people in, etc, but this would taper off quickly and the population stayed limited. Then with industrialisation, you could create surplus anywhere. But you still need food as an input for the workers, and initially that still limited the growth of the cities by how far it could (afford to) be transported. But eventually, technology became so good that its now basically irrelevant where a city is. Really only container ship access matters, and thats a matter of if. ~Noone who has it is physically blocked from expanding it. Now, the best place to run your generic company is in the biggest city, and so it the best place to look for a job, and the only price that can go against it is that of the space.
If you solve this by just building ever more, the result is maybe ten gigantic cities in the whole world (plus small mining towns scattered far apart). And that might be the most efficient thing to do in some sense, but housing still wont be as cheap as it used to. Things just want to clump together now, and they will always want a bit more.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Of course it's not exactly hard to figure out why that might be
And if there were a lot of overlap, it would not be hard to figure out its because the revisionists are far-rightists and so obviously carry water for Putin.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I have the impressions sometimes that people who rediscover non-individualistic ideology end up looking even less individualistic than those that are already there. Their conclusions from it tend to be very ant-colony-maintainance and top-down-rule, because theyre applying the same egoist materialism as before, but now from the perspective of the community instead of an individual.
This is how many people see things even after doing the first step away from individualism, and most definitely before that. So when you talk about Great Men in any context other than them already being leaders who are followed, it will sound relatively more individualistic to them.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I think the shared core of the argument is: An account of whats good for an animal based on what that animal itself pursues, in terms that are causally relatively close to perception and behaviour, and independent of their actual environment, and a claim that we have a responsibility to individual animals to do whats good for them.
Its not important for my argument whether these actually are wrong.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Not necessarily from the same premises. Its a more general sense that, if the Singerian argument werent valid, hers would not be either. That can be because ethical theories share machinery, because they hinge on similar questions of fact, because they draw on the same intuitions, or some other reason.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
as she seems to treat things like poachers as a limitation on the capacity of humans, instead of a chosen activity of humans
In retrospect, I should have included that as one of the cathedralising signs.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I think it reflects a lack of familiarity with the world of academic philosophy.
I think your comment reflects a lack of familiarity with the Cthulhu discourse Im trying to address. Admittedly it doesnt have a canonical name or good reference link. But a good example here would be Benthams defense of homosexuality. When he wrote that, it wasnt a new culture war thing either. But eventually it was.
I don't think it's fair to call this a utilitarian piece.
And here too, we can return to the above example and see that many of those who would later advance the issue were not especially utilitarians, but still employed a broadly similar reasoning turning on similar facts, from deontological or humanistic backgrounds.
I also agree shes not making this argument because its gaining mainstream currency. My point it about what its intellectual history would look like, if it were to gain mainstream currency, and what this tells us about evaluating the relevance of things like the Bentham example to the intellectual history of our current politics.
Im sorry how contrived this looks if you dont know who Im trying to talk to.
Here too there are intermediate states where its unclear whether a proton is part of the atomic core. During radioactive decay, at what point does the atom change element? Now, these intermediates are fine to ignore 99% of the time... just like with lots of other categories that people want to deny being natural.
More options
Context Copy link