RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
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User ID: 2051
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
1d ago
Ten characters in the top 12 this year.
If we use the criterion "viable", 10 even seems to be a significant understatement. There's multiple players in the lower top 100 that main yet other chars. If that's not viable, I don't know what is.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
1d ago
I'm also european (german) and tbh this is exactly the attitude that pisses me off about the current EU. We're the equivalent of a guy who moved in with a friend because "it just makes sense, we save lots of money and we get along great". But as our friend moved forward, has a great job and pays more and more, we got stuck in place and increasingly skimp on the rent. And then we pretend to be surprised when he moves out to the big city, disgusted with us.
The US kept their backyard reasonably clean (Mexico and Canada), their economy has been growing tremendously compared to ours, and they invest appropriately in the military to safeguard their interests. We did none of those things. Russia is pathetic, we should have been able to easily defend Ukraine, but we couldn't, so the US had to jump in despite the fact that keeping Russia at bay is far, far more important to us (even if it may be one interest among many for the US, it's their decision whether they continue investing in this one).
Just to be clear, I want the war to continue, I want Russia to get nothing but a bloody nose. And if we had kept our house in order, we could let the US and Russia have their little peace talk, tell them to fuck off, and continue the war in Ukraine on our own anyway. But we didn't, so we depend on them, and we have no-one to blame but ourselves. WE are the dummys, not them, and we're way too far up our own asses to realize that.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
2d ago
As @self_made_human mentioned, one solution is frequent balance changes / content updates. This is downright necessary for most 2-player games, and has the advantage of also serving the gamemakers interest of reliable long-term income.
Though imo another, less common solution is multiplayer (4+) games with randomly generated, very variable boards and arbitrary alliances. The former means that even overall weaker factions can occasionally be quite strong (think a desert-based faction which is stronger on arid planets and weaker on wet planets), the latter means that the players can make alliances to keep the strongest player at any given point in check. If done well, this also means that you can support a decent variance in general playing strength - worse players can band together against better players. But I guess that is also a reason why this is not super popular in competitive scenes - If you want to find out who is best, you don't to give worse players the chance to beat better players.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
2d ago
I do wish the singleplayer AI had been fleshed out a little more; a pretty common complaint about games of that era.
Era? I've yet to play a single 4X game with a decent AI, which is by far my biggest gripe with the genre; Low difficulty gets boring quickly, high difficulty is about taking advantage of the quirks of the AI. So far I usually have most fun by using medium difficulty, lots of arbitrary self-constraints and/or other obstacles, such as very frequent and aggressive barbarians/pirates.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
2d ago
I should have mentioned it in the OP, but I already had surgery as a newborn to open up my nose airways as much as possible, so probably there's nothing further that can be done. I'll get it checked anyway in case there's some new development, though, so thank's for the recommendation.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
2d ago
Yeah, I also had some kind of cleft lip (not palate AFAIK) and my nose is visibly crooked, a bit like a boxer's nose. It also had malformed airways inside so that I basically couldn't breath through the nose at all at birth. As I was told by my parents, both were fixed in one surgery, but some difficulties remained. For example, I can't play most wind instruments that require one to shape the lip a certain way (which actually was good for me, since it meant that instead of having to play trumpet I got the saxophone when I joined a big band as a kid). I also can't speak a regular "r", just the rolling "r", etc.
I'll probably get it re-checked as the other posters recommended. It's likely that everything that could be done has been done, but it's been 30 years so there's also a good chance that there's some new possibilities.
You should do as well imo. Checking costs nothing (or at least, comparatively little) and lip/mouth birth defects are often associated with nose birth defects AFAIK.
Sometimes I feel like living in a different universe.
First, Dorsey twitter absolutely worked together with many agencies in many countries far above what is was required to do, shown trivially by the fact that Musk Twitter refuses to do so and is nevertheless existing. This was shown in the twitter files, but they are hardly necessary; Here in Germany, our local Blockwarte voluntarily complain about nothing but how much better they could "work together with" Dorsey Twitter to combat "misinformation" than with Musk Twitter. This also goes for the UK. Even beyond western countries, where Musk Twitter is far more resistant to censorship efforts and which have far more resources to staff liaison bureaucrats and as such are a much greater threat to open discourse, Dorsey Twitter was also more than happy to go along with censorship in non-western countries as long as it fit with their left-leaning preconceptions, such as in Brazil or South Africa.
Second, the moderation staff of Dorsey Twitter not only was much, much larger and could handle much greater throughput, but pretty much everyone is primarily complaining about who is allowed to continue posting, and voluntarily leaves due to it, as opposed to being banned. I've seen a lot of people and institutes around me make a big show about posting how they're leaving X and going to bluesky. Not a single one of them was banned, and almost none of them complained about any person ban or topics ban whatsoever, either. It's always about how now that this or that category of person is unbanned, they can't in good conscience stay there. At most they point at some nebulous alleged algorithmic boosting which they have no evidence for but are sure has to exist (and which, ironically, provably existed under Dorsey Twitter, it was just going another way). I don't think it's a coincidence that X discourse has moved closer to the notorious chan-style discourse.
Third, the kind of topics that could get you banned on Dorsey Twitter was incredibly broad, and frequently included taking even milquetoast center right opinions ("there are only two genders") or very basic common-sense observations ("the covid vaccine, just like many other vaccines, has a heightened likelihood of complications for people with autoimmune diseases and as such may not be worth it especially for young people with an autoimmune disease"). People went to other places since they either already were banned or felt they would get banned if they openly discussed the topics they care about.
I'm certainly not happy about how trigger-happy Musk is about criticism of himself or how he runs his company, but in practice it's not only an incredibly limited topic, it also would have gotten you banned on Dorsey Twitter as well, even labelling it similarly as "misinformation" or "conspiracy theories". On doxxing I'm also more split, since this was weaponized pretty hard on Dorsey Twitter.
Also on the Vance talk, I'm an academic who has lived his entire life in Europe (mostly Germany and a few years UK), and I think he's just objectively correct about his statements, not just directionally but also literally, so there's that I guess. It was very moving to see that if we want to have a course-correction, we will have some allies in foreign governments that will help us and stand by us. That's a fairly straightforward foreign policy strategy. The norm-breaking criticism is also pretty hilarious to me, since visiting american democratic politicians love talking about right-wing dangers in Europe which is totally OK, but once it's american republican politicians talking about left-wing dangers it's suddenly a dangerous break with norms.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
4d ago
You're correct that most sinusitis is viral and I should have been clearer with my language - I suspect, and want to avoid, chronic bacterial sinusitis in particular. Yeah, steam inhalation is something I also had on my mind since my mom swears by it, though it's annoying enough that I don't really want to do it very often.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
4d ago
I'm a fellow European so not quite what you want, but I interpret american behaviour quite differently. IMO it's more about the EU finally getting their shit together again. Considering that we used to be the center of the world for quite a while, our performance in the last few decades has been very lacklustre, and especially comparing it to the US shows that this isn't about just having less opportunities to grow since we're already at the top - the US was already ahead, and then jumped even further. Military is just one point of many, but among the most obvious. Trump realized that as long as the Americans are nice to us we will always under-invest in Military and happily depend on them. It's pathetic tbh.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
4d ago
So, after a really bad sinusitis, I've gotten antibiotics for the first time I think ever. At least I can't remember getting any. I've always been quite wary of most medication and doctor visits, and I've been healthy enough to do anything I want.
It felt amazing. On the second day of the antibiotics course I already felt as well as I normally do. But only a few days later, after my nose healed fully and I also was done with the antibiotics itself, it's like I'm a new person. We have a toddler so I get little sleep, but I feel very awake anyway. I normally have significant motivational issues, but now I get things done, and if my wife tries talking me into just going outside to meet with people instead, I tell her I'll get it done ASAP anyway and join up later. My skin is normally very unclean, but I haven't had a single pimple the last two weeks. My nose normally felt moderately clogged pretty much all the time (which I though was unavoidable due to a birth defect), but now it's been completely free.
I strongly suspect now that I've been having a chronic sinusitis - maybe even more generally some kind of bacterial infection - that I didn't notice bc it has been so long, pretty much all my adult life if not longer. I feel borderline manic.
My wife also noticed that I just seem significantly more present, fast & active and told me I need to schedule a meeting with my GP to make sure I don't fall back, which I did. But we're in germany and this isn't acute, so the next open date is in October.
I'll still go anyway, but since we have some doctors here I thought it might make sense to ask here what are my options for things I can do proactively to not get a sinusitis again in the first place. My nose malformation birth defect is real, and I know from MRI that I have absolutely giant sinuses, so I probably have some susceptibility to it. From what I can gather long-term antibiotics are a bad idea, and I'm quite hopeful that it's not necessary anyway. At the moment I'm trying a few things:
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Vitamins / Mineral Supplements every day. Probably not super effective, but also pretty much no downsides if dosed moderately.
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direct nose cleaning with spray every evening before going to sleep, mostly salt water based but also tried some essential oil based ones. Seems to work well, but also some noticeable irritation up to minor bleeding if I overdo it so I've gotten a bit more careful.
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Ultrared light every few evenings. Just generally warms up the face and is pleasant, but doesn't really feel very effective (but also probably little side-effects)
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menthol and similar sugar-free drops. Not sure how much they really do, but they feel good.
I generally have had a bad experience with antihistamine- and corticosteroid-based nasal sprays, and they're a bad idea to take long-term anyway. I'm also playing with the idea of getting Lumina Probiotic despite having never struggled with cavities (but I probably won't). I also want to do some sports again to keep healthy, but I'm quite time-constrained due to our small kids at the moment. But I do get some decent amount of activity thanks to them already, so it's not that bad.
If anybody has any recommendations, please tell me. In the worst case I have some weird susceptibility to bacteria that isn't actually nose-specific, in which case I'm at a loss on what to do. Obviously in the best case, I've gotten rid of it for good and am just worrying unnecessarily. But the difference is big enough that it feels worthwhile to think about.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
21d ago
Aaand they fucked it up. Man, especially the FDP is looking terrible here.
Outside of the legislature, the left also has been escalating to traditional terror tactics against the CDU, like dozens of masked assailants storming office buildings, holding staff against their will and threatening them, and finally thrashing the place after leaving. It's really degenerating into Weimar, a dysfunctional center held hostage by extremists.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
21d ago
Finally. The CDU painted itself into a corner by simultaneously claiming that the state of the welfare & migrant issues is germany's greatest crisis, but also that they will not work together with the only party which is both large enough and actually agrees on this. This went as far as that they took a (binding!) vote back after they realized only the CDU & AfD would vote in favor, pretty much just to avoid the bad optics. They seriously claimed that the voters just have to vote CDU (or at least CDU+FDP) into an absolute majority.
This was just not very credible, especially since Merkel (CDU) arguably started the whole mess. Correspondingly many AfD-voters explicitly said that they don't really agree with the AfD's platform on many issues, but they consider solving the welfare & migrant crisis so important that they're willing to bite the bullet. Hell, I've never voted AfD but strongly consider it for basically the same reasons, but the AfD's platform is just very unappealing to me overall except for those two points of agreement.
Worse yet, before this vote it was heavily implied that the CDU would coalition with the greens or the SPD, neither of which would vote with them, and the AfD was already steadily gaining in the polls. Imo if they had kept the Brandmauer up, the most likely outcome would be a lame duck 2025 government, with an ever-increasing risk of an absolute AfD majority. Which isn't even something most AfD voters want. They were basically just redoing the Weimar Republic.
Now, we can move forward. A CDU-AfD (maybe +FDP) government would still clearly be dominated by the CDU both in terms of votes and in experience & knowledge. It would most likely result in a significant loss of votes for the AfD unless the CDU does some very stupid things, though it would also likely cement the AfD as a long-term mainstream party (probably in the 10% range), again unless the AfD is very stupid. But as you say, the vote is non-binding, and Merz is known to be a little chicken who is eager to be accepted by mainstream journalism, which still leans heavily left.
It's a bit more complicated than that; There is a multi-party alliance of mainstream politicians who prepare such, but it's not officially supported by any of the leading politicians of any large party afaik (one should be cynical enough to consider they may support it indirectly, though). And at least both Merz (CDU candidate) and Scholz (SPD candidate) are on record saying explicitly that the AfD needs to be beaten in the poll booth, not through judicial means. Then again, neither of the two is known to keep their word.
Also, most legal experts that aren't affiliated with any party consider success quite unlikely, and the AfD has already won a few court cases against the government.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
22d ago
Yes, this also frustrates me greatly. I'm dependent on grant money for my current job, but I have little problem admitting that it's perfectly fair for the public to decide to stop funding me. It doesn't even need to be for a good reason, it's their money! But unfortunately, many people feel entitled to get government money. This is one reason why expanding governments are so hard to reduce in size; Most people primarily vote on how they are themselves short-term impacted, and a safe & cushy low-intensity government feels really great, so getting that taken from you sucks hard.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
22d ago
Atheism doesn't necessitate any specific moral stance.
That's the point. If you think a shared, mostly rigid moral framework is necessary for societies to hold together (you don't need to be religious to think this), and that atheism can't really compellingly argue for any moral stance in particular, the obvious conclusion is that a society of atheists will reliably fragment and struggle working towards any meaningful shared goal. Which means that if a society holds together, it is in spite of the atheists in it. As an atheist, I consider the fate of the early atheism internet wars and the atheism plus fights clear vindication of this theory.
The counterpoint is that there are nowadays a decent number of non-religious ideologies that can hold atheists together. The counterpoint to that is that once you spent any time around ideologues, it becomes clear that ideology serves a function and form near-identical to religion for them, including the archetypical esoteric, nonsensical and/or unprovable assumptions and claims.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
23d ago
Graham Factor has a nice article(just apply for access, it only takes a day or so to get approved) which includes a part on how de-facto outsourcing of government work to NGOs gives you the worst of all worlds, especially in the context of the police: The same inefficiency as the government but with none of the accountability.
I don't think NGOs need to be banned, but the current reality of government funding of unaccountable NGOs combined with a revolving door between either of them is quite dysfunctional. Nothing raises my cynicism like seeing a high-level government worker being so outrageously incompetent as to lose their position (a tall order to begin with!) due to public pressure, only for them to manage some multi-million government-funded NGO immediately thereafter.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
23d ago
Nowadays I'm writing my own grants for my research and talk enough with the other side to understand their reasoning and tbh the entire grant-based funding scheme has horrible, horrible structural incentives. To begin with, both sides have a strong incentive to bloat. You know what is more prestigious than managing 50k grants? It's managing 100k grants. On the grant writer side, if a grant is offering 25k but we only have a small project that needs 10k for some extra consumables, what do you think we'll do? Exactly, I say a pilot single cell RNAseq experiment for 4 of the samples adding up to 12k is totally a great idea and make the grant sound as if this was the plan from the start (and it sounds really prestigious since scRNA-seq is a reasonably new tech that the committee deciding the grant is likely to be impressed). This is most obvious in the fact that you're not just not rewarded for saving money, you're actively punished (if you didn't spend all the money you were granted, this makes people angry - they don't want it back - and it's significantly less likely to get your next grant). Second, as already alluded, it's all strongly optimized to sound new, exceptional and fancy. If people handle their own money, they want boring, reliable and necessary (which is imo severely missing in current science). Third, behind closed doors the money often gets shuffled around for other purposes, so the text of the project proposal does not even necessarily reflect the project on-the-ground very well anyway (this is worst for very large projects in which an easy overview of point-by-point financing for every little consumable, staff or outsourced services is just not feasible).
And I'm quite sure that I'm in a comparatively functional field - at least in principle we're investigating stuff like new treatments for cancer, which particular variants cause genetic diseases and similar. I have a colleague working with humanities people and not only are they explicitly identifying as activists fighting for disabled rights as opposed to, you know, scientists, they also try to bully her into stopping her research since investigating severe inborn disabilities is ableist. But the official projects they're part of all sound really nice and positive at first glance.
Also, the problem on cutting the other way around - looking for the X most-stupid-sounding projects - has been tried multiple times, in multiple countries, by different libertarian-inclined parties and it just doesn't work. If you try to go through all funding one-by-one and cut the most stupid sounding, you will first have to fight and justify a lot "but why this", then you're likely getting hit with a lawsuit that tries to prove that you did cut funding in some discriminatory way (which isn't unlikely because there's probably some equally stupid project that you didn't hit since you tried to be more targeted), and then after all the fighting you maybe saved 0.1% of the budget and might not even have hit the actually worst and most useless programs, because the descriptions are optimized to sound nice and the structures behind it are optimized to hide wasteful spending.
At this point I'm willing to turn it on the head: Cut as much as possible, then reinstitute only the absolutely necessary (ideally now not even grant-dependent anymore - if it's necessary it shouldn't be grant-dependent!), and then everyone has to prove again that whatever they're doing is actually a good ROI for society. If my research gets cut, that's probably worth it & I just go into industry.
Morally: yes. Whether he had any chance of getting it or not in practice. I'm genuinely not sure what that observation is supposed to prove and would appreciate some elaboration. Surely a man who, by force of circumstances, is about to be lethally hit by - say - an unavoidable tidal wave, still has a "right to life" in all morally and politically relevant senses. The unfortunate nature of his circumstances has no bearing on that principle.
It's about you committing a category error. Nobody would think that saving Crusoe would be bad. However, society-granted rights are about the most basic imaginable, things that a society can always grant no matter how poor it currently is. "Right to life" has never entailed immortality, it merely means that society should not take or needlessly risk your life. If you're alone, there is no society to threaten you (I guess you can kill yourself). If there's two, the "right to life" principle merely states that neither of you should (lightly) take actions that threaten the other's life.
Once you have some fuzzy number n and you need a leader or a group of leaders (called government), it means that those leaders shouldn't take actions against your life, and protect you from deathly threats from the other members of your society (ideally also other societies, but that is not always feasible given size differences, so again not really a right). A society can always protect its members from itself, if someone can take your life with a gun they can necessarily also protect you with the same gun. It's merely about whether they elect to do so. Yes you can confuse this by dividing a society strictly into government and non-government, but this is mostly evidence of a failed society; In a functioning one, the relevant parts of a government can always be extended or reduced (though this process may take some time).
The obvious retort here may be, but what if you have subsistence farmers so busy that they can't even organize the most basic militia to protect themselves from each other? But the answer is equally obvious, namely that if you spend all your time on your farm and can't spare any time outside of it in a militia, you also have no time forming a society in the first place; in which case you're, again, only a society with yourself, the other farmers merely geographically close but not part of the same society, similar to how irl tribes can be quite close without having any (positive) interactions whatsoever.
So in short, it's about how a society ought not being in the way of each other's life, liberty and happiness. Outright helping each other achieve it is of course desirable, and almost all societies try! But the degree to which it is attainable is dependent on many outside factors, so it makes no sense to construe it as a right, and the way progressives try to pretend they're special by doing so is simply presumptuous & arrogant.
And this distinction is still critical nowadays, since in particular healthcare is a black hole capable of eating arbitrary amounts of money. Ironically, the primary difference between America and other western countries isn't that Americans have worse healthcare outcomes (let alone "thousands dying due to unavailable treatment") - in fact, if you compare like-for-like, such as, say, japanese in America vs japanese in Japan (and most other groups), then Americans actually have significantly better healthcare outcomes then most others. It's merely that they spend excessively more compared to modest improvements; But this is simply a function of the fact that healthcare has starkly diminishing returns, the same can be seen for rich vs poor people.
Construing healthcare as a right, on top, has terrible incentives. It means that the moment a new technology to save lifes is developed, it needs to be used on everyone who needs it, costs be damned. In other words, developing new technology becomes negative sum for a society. Modern western countries have somewhat found a way out of this conundrum by labeling all new technologies unsafe and unusable by default (usually even for those who can privately afford it!), and only if you can prove it is safe by running a large-scale study (which incidentally is only really feasible with somewhat cost-effective treatments) it is allowed to be used.
But it's no accident that the overwhelming majority of new treatments is developed in America, since the incentives are much better aligned if you can develop a new treatment, let it be used by everyone who can afford it, it then gets improved (or discarded) depending on performance, and then the masses get access. Ironically, it de-facto also turns the richest into (willing, at least) guinea pigs. But of course, this is then easy to present as some sort of evil rich people conspiracy, keeping the good treatment from the regular people and letting them die. But in the rest of the western world, the people also don't get the good treatment (in fact they get it later or it doesn't even get developed in the first place), it's merely more equal by keeping it from the rich as well. This should be considered an abhorrent outcome - literally everything is worse for everyone - under most reasonable ethical systems. But the superficial optics are better, so it's favored by the easily swayed.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
30d ago
His req was "remote from preindustrial societies", which this isn't.
Blacks also afaik hit motoric child developmental milestones significantly faster, which are almost 100% biological, but again that's very relevant for preindustrial societies.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
1mo ago
Substack is alive and well, and there are a whole number of good posters in adjacent topics, some of which used to be prolific posters on themotte (hwfo,kulak) but most, as expected, are from other places. The problem is that themotte is starting to outlive its usefulness - twitter is better for low effort posts and a pretty open platform nowadays, substack is similarly open but better suited for quality content, and the overton window has shifted so much that Scott is now effectively writing about the things he more-or-less banned us for. Though I'm still a bit salty he isn't apologizing or at least referencing to themotte about it in retrospect, overall I'm much more happy about it.
Themotte, in contrast, has always been more a medium-effort discussion platform that discussed high-effort content as opposed to generate it. Which is just a bit of awkward spot to be in.
Also, since nobody has mentioned it, you should definitely take a look at thelastpsychiatrist/Alone/Edward Teach. He was a significant influence on Scott, and roughly stopped posting (2014) at the time when Scott blew up (incidentally, this was also shortly after I became familiar with Scott). He's definitely more on the esoteric side than the rationalist side, though.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
1mo ago
Actually this is currently being investigated quite a lot, there is a massive ancient dna boom and if you can read a little bit between the lines it's pretty obvious from the papers that get published; Short story, a relatively small group migrated from africa to somewhere in the area between the arabic peninsula and the black sea, underwent (historically speaking) rapid evolution (including cold adaption and , um, "neurological changes") and then migrated further into all directions, which resulted in the modern caucasian/asian split. Modern-day subsaharan blacks have almost no ancestry from this group. I'll have to look up the exact time frame again.
But if you want to know more, razib khan also has lots on ancient dna research.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
1mo ago
To bad nobody else has answered; I don't really have the time to write anything about it, but some things have to be said, so I will.
Scott is right that a) Priesthoods are a naturally arising organising principle among humans and b) Science has been a priesthood for a while before wokeness became a large issue. And it's somewhat reasonable to conclude that therefore, maybe nothing was wrong with science being a priesthood before wokeness, which means maybe there also is nothing wrong with science being a priesthood nowadays in itself.
There is, however, some objections that should automatically come to mind here (and which imo old Scott would have noted):
First, his definition of priesthood makes little sense considering real priesthoods that have existed. Those mostly fulfilled criteria like the following: a) credentialism separating the priests from the masses b) a strong preoccupation with (personal) purity according to some internal set of moral norms. And given the central importance of religion to past societies, these moral norms were usually religious in nature. Hence, priests. But sovjet-style political commissars are fundamentally the same. It has little to do with "smart people only"; Many priesthoods didn't optimize for smartness much and had no problem with having clearly stupid people between their ranks, as long as the moral criteria were fulfilled. Instead, it is about being a coordinated group that can give benefits to insiders, control the public and punish competition. Priesthoods are clearly optimized for wielding and extending political power for a certain class of elite people. Finding truth has nothing to do with it. At the most charitable, they are about keeping peace and order in society.
Then further, we can ask:
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Are there contemporary examples of sciences that don't work like priesthoods?
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Are there past times during which science overall wasn't like a priesthood?
So for the first question, (theoretical) math immediately comes to mind for me. When reading up on theoretical math news , I regularly encounter solutions to problems that have stumped mathematicians, sometimes for centuries, which only were solved with the help of laymen. How does math do this? Pretty simple, actually; It uses its own specific language that generally has high requirements on your intelligence to learn, and which intrinsically serves as a barrier against low-effort swipes. Even just shortly talking with someone makes it quite obvious whether they know what they are talking about. Credentialised science obviously is the fastest way to acquire this understanding, but certainly not the only. There is often little interest in who you are, whether in terms of credentials or moral considerations, as long as you can contribute.
I'll certainly not be able to give a comprehensive overview, but just a few examples of science as practiced in the past; Let's start with the greeks, since they are the oldest with quality records (it's correct that the ancient near east scientific tradition probably predated the greeks, but the records are terrible, like a single tablet with some pythagorean triplets which may indicate knowledge of the pythagorean theorem, but also may just have been derived by brute force, we just don't know).
Greek science was mostly disorganized, some doing it as an extension to their actual craft with which they earned money, some priests, some just considering themselves "natural philosophers" with no clear occupation (first NEETs?). There were specific schools which sometimes could veer of into cultish, priesthood-like behaviour patterns internally, but science as a whole was always a mix of multiple competing schools with different interpretations of basic reality as well as many unaffiliated yet respected philosophers. Arguably the most influential philosopher, Socrates, was forced to to kill himself for his perceived clash with prevailing religious/moral sentiments. Yet, as a philosopher this did not diminish his standing in the slightest. And the greek scientific tradition is still considered one of the greatest, often explicitly labeled as the origin.
Islamic science in the middle ages explicitly saw themselves as inheritors of the greek tradition of science, and the way scientist were generally judged primarily by their results as opposed to their person and character is often considered one of the primary reasons why they advanced faster than the west at the same time; Mind you, I'm not claiming that they had no moral/religious requirements - Islam can be quite strict-, just that having less than the western monastery-dominated scientific tradition of the middle ages gave them a distinct advantage.
Which leads us to science in the late european middle age and the resulting renaissance. As mentioned, european science in the earlier middle ages was almost entirely done by monks in monasteries with all the resulting moral/religious blocks. Starting around the beginning of last millenia, partially caused by more excess resources, partially influenced by the success (and threat!) of islamic science, there was a clear progression from the very priesthood-like early monastery tradition, to the religious universities with obvious carve outs such as protections from certain wordly punishments and "ex cathedra/hypothesis" opinions allowing inquiry into moderate taboo topics. Together with the religious upheavals of the 16th century this progressed further into the Renaissance, which outright identified itself by its allowance to question everything.
Incidentally, this is usually considered the time of greatest scientific progress. Similar to contemporary math, while credentialed university-educated scholars certainly dominated science, laymen, whether self- or otherwise privately educated, were tolerated as long as they were capable of speaking a certain language and bringing results. The early british royal society included multiple members who had little meaningful credentials despite universities having existed for quite a long time at that time. It was more-or-less founded by Robert Boyle, who had the equivalent of a modern high school education in terms of credentials but who was privately taught and ran his own laboratory with his families' money. Only after having established an informal "invisible college", he later simply rented space near Oxford University to run a better lab, profiting from Oxford's University but AFAIK never officially being affiliated with it directly, yet his contemporary and later academics respected him; Make a guess, how would current universities, journals and the general educated class talk about & treat a rich kid with a high school education running his own lab?
So to summarize everything and give my own thoughts on the matter: Priesthoods are an okay institution to generate some scientific output. It has happened multiple times in the past, especially during difficult times when people are unwilling to spend money on long-term endeavours such as science intrinsically is (but they still might be willing to spend for "a good cause"). Early middle ages are a good example here. Knowledge is power, therefore priests want to extend some of it as long as it does not call into question their grip on power.
But science as its own optimized institution, capital-S Science, doesn't really mesh all that well with it. Scientific output is reliably highest when scientists are individualistic and willing to question everything, when there is no single, easily captured institution, when they are judged by output, not character (and the output itself is also not judged by how well it fits in with prevailing sentiments) and especially when it gets regularly checked against a hard reality that is difficult to socially engineer. Scott cites his Bauhaus review on the norms of scientists, but the people involved in these discussions clearly had no scientific objections whatsoever, just read it again, they didn't even claim to; it was all strictly moral considerations. At best, they aped, in the cargo-cult fashion Feynman described, some superficial properties of science.
So imo he misidentifies multiple negative priesthood-like tendencies as sensible "bulwarks". The best scientist, from whatever age, era or field were almost always occupied to degree of obsession with answering some question or attaining some knowledge. They didn't care much for giving the impression of separation from the public. They didn't care for separation from capital, often they worked with it for their own advantage. They have no tendency towards intra-social-class political games and purity spirals, often even having a distinctly amoral streak (or strong personal moral convictions that don't fit well into any particular class of people). They often have a surprising overlap with the stereotype of the eccentric, obsessed, overworked but extraordinarily smart start-up founder.
These bulwarks are instead very good markers of a priesthood that successfully managed to subjugate the institution of Science again after it has temporarily managed to wrestle itself free, while doing what it always has done. Since this process was continuous & slow, and since even priesthoods want knowledge being generated, universities have still been working somewhat well for a long time even after being taken over, just like they have worked somewhat well every time priesthoods ran science. But good science is something else.
Of course, one sneaky objection here is that, if priesthoods are optimized for power, they will always win any conflict against a non-priesthood eventually. Therefore, Scott is engaging in the long-term correct course of actions: Molding a new priesthood that is maximally optimized for science while still retaining the critical traits necessary to stay in power. I don't really disagree with this view, but it's not really a objection on content, rather on pragmatism.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
1mo ago
"vast majority of parasites" is a massive overstatement, even though I largely agree that many could probably be fired. Most are nice, pretty normal people who work in a social context that does not properly reward - often even punishes - hard work and efficiency, so they don't. And because that's how people are, they have some clearly (to me, at least) self-serving believes why their work can't be made significantly easier.
Primarily imo government work needs to be re-structured significantly, and while doing that you can fire many, which is part of the reason why they resist efforts to change (why do you want to take away my nice & safe job?). But if you just fire them without changing the culture, you get the problem Scott described in his latest essay.
On your question for wall street, I'm still an ordoliberalist at heart; So while I think that correct pricing is very valuable, the degree to which some capital companies are both central and arcane is enough to allow substantial abuse, especially if they introduce ever-more mystic instruments. There probably is some way to limit them without hurting the overall economy in practical terms and as you say redirect their tremendous human capital to better endeavours. But at least for the time being, I don't really trust any current western government to not fuck this up massively, and any practical consequences are impossible to predict without knowing the details of any such plan.
RenOS
the great beast is rumbling in its sleep
1mo ago
Declaring something does not make it so. If a car salesman calls a car "a great bargain" nobody batts an eye if you say prove it, but somehow if it's the government it's considered true unless proven wrong. After their visa runs out, they have the choice to stay in a first-world country illegaly or go back to the third world legally. Would you go back? I certainly wouldn't, so I don't even blame them very much. Are they incentivized to go back? Not really, since not giving them support in line with first world standards despite their illegal status is ruled inappriopriately cruel by the courts. Are they getting deported? Not unless they cooperate, since they have first have a long time to legally fight any deportation order (unless the government can prove they have money, the government will have to pay both legal sides, which will be horrendously expensive) and even if they lose they still have a long time to vanish before a deportation order is processed (and of the already-existing illegal immigrants most aren't ordered to begin with, anyway). It's obviously hard to prove how many exactly it's going to be, but the legal realities in canada mean that any temporary worker who wants to stay will simply do so. And similar experiences from other western countries have shown that this will often be a large percentage, and unfortunately usually the least desirable to boot. It's just terrible incentives all-around.
Lacking adaptivity is a great understatement. I've played multiple entries in the genre in which I was at first amazed, only to find out that the AI is barely functional for several factions - it gets stuck on a small number of planets, utterly mismanages holdings in a way that even a static AI could do better or is completely incapable of running a war in a meaningful sense.
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