MotteInTheEye
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User ID: 578
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
The question isn't assigning blame, it's actually assigning credit for success. If America's success is primarily due to slavery, then a) maybe the slaves are owed not just for the wrongs due to them but also for the lion's share of America's prosperity and b) the achievements of the founders are proportionally reduced, so fidelity to their principles is less important.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
It all depends on what the point of saying "America was built on slavery" is. My impression is that the goal of this movement is to establish that the USA's extraordinary economic prowess and status as the premier world power is due to (would not have existed without) its early reliance on slavery, rather than to its unique founding principles or constitution. If this is true, then the case for forfeiting its those founding principles to atone for the evils of slavery through e.g. reparations or affirmative action is strengthened.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Not with that phrasing, perhaps, but the idea that crime is caused by systemic issues and social conditions is equivalent to saying that those things create a social niche which someone will fill.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
By removing a small number of people from the streets we can have a drastic reduction in crime.
I think this is plausible but doesn't follow inevitably from the rest. Presumably the progressive response would be that the societal niche exists independently of the specific person who ends up filling it. Consider an analogous claim that, because 1% of people (fast food workers) do 90% of the deep frying in the US, we could improve obesity stats by removing a small number of people from the streets.
Your prediction is a useful one to distinguish between these hypotheses, but also hard to differentiate from a deterrent effect making crime less attractive (which we would also expect to see if we arrested all fast food workers).
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Given how much more quickly it swept through the rest of the world, it doesn't seem plausible that it's been raging for two years in China and is just now getting too big to hide.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
For 5, what's your explanation for why their reported numbers are shooting up now? To me it always seemed likely that they were covering up their real numbers but I don't see why they would stop that now, whereas if they were telling the truth and have a mostly COVID-naive population then it would make sense that at some point they would have to pay the piper.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
They are performative in the sense that they don't result in any legislative action, but like you I think they are warranted and will be fascinating.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Basically nobody wants AI to tell them what their goals should be. They want it to help them accomplish their existing goals. If the current frontrunners vision is accomplished, they will essentially be able to instantiate limitless instances of an intelligent being devoted to their causes. The utility of that is pretty obvious.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
If you're not already running a local developer instance of TheMotte, then you're not the volunteer material Zorba's looking for.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Think of topics like "how AI algorithms discriminate against underrepresented minorities", "why do tech companies hire so few black people", "here's the latest outrageous thing Trump/Musk said on Twitter", "Amazon suppresses worker organization at its warehouses", "which tech giant has the greenest commitments and initiatives", "sexist gamers are review-bombing the latest AAA video game because the protagonist is a woman", etc etc.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I don't think segregation is the right term for this unless the call to patronize black-owned businesses is only intended only for black people. It's simple racial discrimination.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
It seems like it would be better for you just to go watch the videos, they aren't hard to find. I'm not sure why you are soliciting more secondhand information when you don't trust the secondhand information you already received.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Thanks for the detailed breakdown! I'm still not seeing where the sense of "getting in trouble" is coming from in your explanation though.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I'm trying to wrap my head around what you are saying about the last sentence, you're saying that there is one word which expresses "switching channels will get you in trouble"? Or is the "switching channels" part just implied from context in the original Russian phrasing?
MotteInTheEye
2yr ago
I guess the problem with this is that your potential cabinet members are going to have other important jobs which would be impacted by the announcement that there is a 50/50 chance they'll be quitting.
MotteInTheEye
2yr ago
It just doesn't seem to stick at all to me. If you were going to choose a group to call "sanctimonious" in our current political climate, it would have to be the woke, and if Desantis is known for anything these days it's for finding new ways to get the woke worked up.
MotteInTheEye
2yr ago
Was military intervention right-coded in the Clinton era? I wasn't politically engaged then but I know in the West Wing "Republicans want to have the biggest army and never send it anywhere" was presented as a commonplace joke.
MotteInTheEye
2yr ago
Pelosi asked how they could resolve the situation, and what DEPAPE wanted to do. DEPAPE stated he wanted to tie Pelosi up so that DEPAPE could go to sleep as he was tired from having had to carry a backpack to the Pelosi residence.
This part is cracking me up, like he's complaining about how inconveniently located the Pelosis' house is for violent nutjobs.
MotteInTheEye
2yr ago
Seems like growth, contraction, and staying exactly the same are the only logical options, and staying exactly the same isn't a realistic option for any significant time period.
MotteInTheEye
2yr ago
I'm pretty sure the navigators were called the Guild in Dune as well.
MotteInTheEye
2yr ago
And the flip side is that most grandparents are too old and frail to contribute much to the household by the time they have grandchildren.
MotteInTheEye
2yr ago
The whole "growth mindset" bundle of ideas trades a lot on this motte-and-bailey.
Motte: All else being equal, someone who believes that hard work matters and innate talent does not will perform better than someone who believes the opposite.
Bailey: It is actually the case that hard work matters and innate talent does not.
My understanding is that the studies focus on supporting the motte - to the extent that there is good science here, it supports the motte. (It's social science so of course that extent is very little.) But most of the discussion around growth mindset acts as if the bailey was proven, which the studies don't even attempt to prove.
It's interesting because it's hard to know how self-consciously this substitution is made. Is it done intentionally by people who believe the motte and therefore wish to convince people of the bailey for their own good? Is it simple confusion? Is it bad faith twisting of social science to support a politically desired conclusion (the blank slate hypothesis)?
I suspect that a large component is that believers in the motte want to resolve cognitive dissonance when it comes to acting on the motte. They are convinced that it will be good for others if they are persuaded of the bailey. But this holds whether the bailey is true or not! And trying to convince people of something that's not true for their own good is the kind of thing bad guys do, and they are not bad guys, so the bailey must be true.
MotteInTheEye
2yr ago
I don't think that's quite the whole story because without weight classes, you wouldn't watch a big buy beat up a little guy, you just wouldn't have a little guy in boxing at all.
There might be multiple factors involved, because most sports have a women's version at the top levels, and they obviously have developmental levels like high school and college because otherwise you don't have a pipeline of new players, but not as many have "pro, but not as good" levels which would correspond to boxing weight classes. There's no "short guys" NBA.
MotteInTheEye
2yr ago
I do think the median republican is more able to have a civilized political conversation with his ideological opposites than the median democrat
I understand the sentiment that this metric is supposed to point to, but the metric itself doesn't seem coherent. The ideological opposite of the median Republican is the median Democrat, so unless you have some asymmetrical concept of a civilized political conversation, this can't be the case.
I spent half an hour or so watching this the other day. You a reading tea leaves here - there is no joke. I must have seen a couple dozen brief scenes in that stretch and not a single one of them had any kind of joke. The AI is just spitting out the kind of dialogue that Seinfeld characters generally talk about without any goal of making it funny.
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