cuwurious_strag_CA
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User ID: 190
cuwurious_strag_CA
2yr ago
Children of every age over 4 have seen animals having sex since literally the dawn of pre-history, and they're smart enough to analogize it to humans. Yet they weren't scarred for life or anything. (heard that from my relatives who worked on a farm 80 years ago).
Sex and porn are special
Why? How? How much so? Your ideological opponents argue that racism / slurs / harassment / violent threats are special, too.
cuwurious_strag_CA
2yr ago
the multimc fork is https://github.com/PrismLauncher/PrismLauncher i think
cuwurious_strag_CA
2yr ago
Who has HBD fallen out of favor for on the far right? They may be posting detailed IQ analyses less, but not because of any disbelief that blacks are lower iq or do more crime bc genes
I just created an account on The Motte to PM someone a question, and afterwards I started browsing through some links and found this post in the vault
This is related to why 'account nags' are so persistent - having an account really does lead to using the platform more! (it also hands over your email for marketing spam).
Most HBDers do misrepresent studies, and misunderstand a lot of the data they use, and make poor arguments with poor conclusions. AFAICT this is universal in academia though. That's not to say that it's fine when HBDers do it, or minimize it at all - it is incredibly awful, disgusting, etc when anyone does it, and it's pathetic how universal it is. But it's not like "both sides really want a position to be true, so they push their side" is the only reason the "science" is shit. Priming wasn't better, much of psychology is still not better. Many HBDers really did think equality was true before they looked at the data or society, and both sides genuinely do believe their side to be true and have all sorts of justifications for it.
If we look at individuals instead of races, there's a reason scott alexander's father was a smart doctor, his brother was a gifted pianist who "... was now by far the best student in my Introductory Piano Class, even though he had just started and was two or three years younger than anyone else there ... a little while later, Yamaha USA flew him to Japan to show him off before the Yamaha corporate honchos there ... one thing led to another, and my brother won several international piano competitions, got a professorship in music at age 25, and now routinely gets news articles written about him calling him “among the top musicians of his generation".
One of the funnier parts of HBD is ... if we should act on heritable intellectual differences between races in any way, we should probably do so for heritable intellectual differences between individuals too. And the latter clearly exist, and are critical drivers of all existing talent. IQ-selective immigration when? Well, that's not flying with the voters. An extra hundred million 100iq people isn't quite as useful as an extra 100k 140iq people.
Also, there's a reason yud and scott are jewish. How does that happen if race isn't related to heritable intelligence? 30% of nobel prize winners in math and hard sciences, etc
So "HBD" in that sense is still accurate? A liar may still tell truths, dirt may cover otherwise-pristine marble, etc.
cuwurious_strag_CA
2yr ago
It seems to be a federated social media concept. The idea's afaict similar to mastodon/activitypub - no one company controls everything, users can sign up using a 'server' operated by anyone and see tweets/interact with users on any other server, plus move between servers. 'Censorship' would be, the idea is, not possible, merely individuals or servers curating the kind of content they want to see. HN on bluesky HN discussion + link on the federated protocol itself (but half the comments are pointless rants about how they didnt use activitypub)
cuwurious_strag_CA
2yr ago
I'm not sure conflating 'the populist base' and 'the alt-right' makes sense though. The latter talk about jews and retvrning and hierarchy and anime on the internet, the former are - as far as i can tell - mostly normal american christian republicans who, if politically active, were conservative ten years ago.
Whenever something violent happens to a congressperson, or even when there's a newsworthy bomb threat or police shooting, there's always a few thousand people who intuit that it was a false flag or a crazy soap opera event. They read a few dozen paragraphs in news stories, note perceived inconsistencies, and start posting. Some do it on discord, some write for 'fake news' websites. A few are making stuff up for clicks, but afaict most genuinely believe it. Almost always this ends up being completely made up, and when it isn't it's usually coincidental. (this guy was a FBI PLANT! [two weeks later] yeah, I called that he was a generic schizo instead of being politically motivated, the libs overreacted so hard lmao). It's really uninteresting to ask 'what are the consequences if it really was a gay lover' - it's like asking 'what if steve bannon and the russians really did personally fund republican stochastic terrorism'
but appears to have a set a life circumstances far outside of the standard Trump supporter. (Is that fair summation of the facts
This doesn't mean he wasn't a trump supporter, though, there are plenty of violent and insane members of both parties, given each is ~ 1/3 of the us population. Obviously this doesn't mean any republican beliefs or policies are wrong either.
cuwurious_strag_CA
2yr ago
Safari on mac doesn't support ublock, afaict. Even when I'm using safari, though, I just press 'm' and look somewhere else
cuwurious_strag_CA
2yr ago
The closest analogy would be 'russian troll farms on social media', though? It's arguably less of a provocation, since they're just creating accounts and posting, instead of 'censoring', but there was a lot of noise about that.
Even for the china nba and disney thing, we know about them because of "mainstream media" reporting!
cuwurious_strag_CA
2yr ago
What do you think would've happened if twitter put a misinformation infobox on a lot of the Uighur concentration camp content a few years ago, or deprioritized it? There would have been massive backlash. Internal whistleblowers, hearings, investigations, etc.
cuwurious_strag_CA
2yr ago
As ilforte said, the nba and disney things are incredibly minor and unsurprising (compare to disney's desire to make culturally-acceptable movies in the US) compared to politically censoring one of the main social media platforms in the united states. The latter is something that many maintream publications and politicans, even govt or intelligence agencies, have their eyes trained on like a hawk. If china really convinced musk to censor tianmen square 2.0 on twitter, the reaction would be severe.
cuwurious_strag_CA
2yr ago
Given that twitter is headquartered in the US, china censoring 'discourse' in the US would be a defcon 1 national security event and something the media of all colors would be all over, elon seeming to be a patriotic american, and china having a similar level of 'influence' with many other executives and companies in america due to the very deep trade ties between us, I don't think this is a large threat. It probably won't happen - and even if it did, the response from the US, including the "sjw bluechecks", would be significant.
"Less that 10% of 266 Twitter employees who participated in a poll on messaging app Blind expected to still have their jobs in three months. Blind allows employees to air grievances anonymously after they sign up with corporate emails."
(probably not an accurate estimate bc sampling + bad answers, but does indicate mood in twitter)
cuwurious_strag_CA
2yr ago
Interestingly enough, I went to archive.org to look up that first link given that the post felt much more uh.... tame than I remembered. And sure enough, I came up with this.
this is the guy maintaining unqualified-reservations.org, and he has edited some of the articles to remove ""misinterpreted"" passages in the interest of 'helping' moldbug.
However - unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com:80 is still up on archive.org with the original posts + comments
apparently he was the one who got them excluded. https://twitter.com/moldbug_ebooks/status/1570816842679357440 which is ... very ... strange
"You are asking me to highlight the exact passages I just said were being disparagingly quoted out of context. This means you are either naïve or engaging in bad faith. And now you’ve escalated to insults, so I respectfully decline to engage further."
snappy quote...
cuwurious_strag_CA
2yr ago
A lot of white nationalists, groypers, "alt-right" people, do explicitly claim the "white race" is superior to other races generally, in a way that a critique like this does sort of attack. They do just say 'white men built civilization, we can't have foreigners as they aren't civilization", and sometimes-made rhetorical claims that germans / anglos / nordics (often used to just mean anglos/germans) are 'the most superior' aren't really taken seriously. Although this critique seems weaker than "what's going on with all the jewish and asian and some middle eastern nobel prize winners or ceos tho"
cuwurious_strag_CA
2yr ago
It's entirely possible to make a good decision in one area, and a bad one in another area, while genuinely intending the good decision. Maybe the entertainers had political capital, maybe there was an internal power struggle over it, in general local governments are often incompetent and make dumb decisions.
cuwurious_strag_CA
2yr ago
The other half of moldbug's claim was that the socialists, communists, liberals, etc agitated within european states and within the colonized states for independence - providing material support, media support, etc to third world states. Amerindians had internal resistance, yeah, but didn't have that significant external support of many kinds. The first alone wouldn't be enough.
cuwurious_strag_CA
2yr ago
An overview of moldbug's views on this- from cromer to romer and back again, how to occupy and govern a foreign country, matthew yglesias: anatomy of an intellectual crackhead.
Those who are predisposed against spending time professionally in close quarters with strangers are fine in an agrarian society
Is "tendency to spend time professionally in close quarters with strangers" even a distinct "trait" that is solely or mostly genetic, like fur color? I'm fairly sure that if you took a bantu or hunter gatherer fetus and implanted them into a mother in Kowloon Walled City, when they grew up they'd be entirely used to, and find natural, being around so many other people. They might have other problems, but people are intelligent and work in the culture and environment they're born into.
We're talking about weeding out or magnifying certain existing traits that are known to have significant heritable components
Sure, and I agree a change like some behavior-related alleles becoming 30% more common can't be excluded. But there are a ton of possible changes those could cause, and the way they interact with 'culture' is probably complicated and contingent, such that claiming this "determines" culture in any sense is probably wrong.
As a thought experiment, if only one in three blond people reproduced in each generation, I hope it's obvious that we'd dramatically reduce the proportion of blond people within three generations. It wouldn't take long at all.
We have genetic material for populations in the last 200 years though, and I don't think any alleles were that strongly selected. And most of ones that were mostly selected were - iirc, i'd have to look again - diet or disease related, as opposed to brain, and none nearly so much as 'blondes have children at 1/3 the rate of brown haired'.
Is it so hard to believe that the advance of technology alone wouldn't impose selective pressures sufficient to manifest over just three or four generations
It could've selected for something. But something that determined culture? I.e. played a large role in it, such that people without it are culturally incompatible? Over four generations?
Generally - india, japan, northern europe, central europe are different places, with different native cultures - what selective pressures would be present in all of them over the last ten generations (and some less than ten) that would that rapidly raise the genes for a tolerant and liberal culture from a brutish and reactionary one, or some other significant cause? At the same time? Even if there was one driving allele for every cultural change at the same time, present in 1 in 100 people ten generations ago and very common (say, 50%) today, it'd need to 1.5x every generation. And there'd be many genes necessarily involved, and selecting for one 'competes' with selecting for any other, as does it with any other existing selection (for intelligence, physical compatibility with novel environment, diseases, etc). Even if - purely hypothetically - that did happen for anglos - how are there serbians, russians, middle easterners, indians, chinese, koreans - all firmly culturally assimilated into the american elite? How was the queer iranian category theorist's culture determined by their race?
"Ubiquitous access to contraceptives" has existed for three generations, and tends selects against modern tendencies, right? "Totally new career paths and educational trajectories" many of these career paths & educational trajectories existed for a small subset of the population for the past ten generations. ,Those that weren't were fairly universal - industry, universal schooling, etc - but how exactly do these present such a strong selective pressure for some complex cultural thing, when they're mostly designed allow anyone to work or get an education?
cuwurious_strag_CA
2yr ago
I'm genuinely not sure what OP's thesis is, exactly.
Genetics can change substantially over thousands of years
I don't think 200 years is enough for the recent cultural changes in japan, india, europe, or anywhere else that 'developed'. There probably were evolved genetic changes in 'behavior' in some senses, but I genuinely don't know what those might be, and they're probably rather contingent and complicated. Similarly - racial differences in 'attitudes', organization, or something are ... plausible, but I'm really not sure what they might be, and strongly suspect they mix in complex ways with the existing culture than anything like 'being more aggressive', 'being less emotional', etc. (And also significant variation within races, etc)
(like with intelligence, this isn't a reason to reject sorting, hierarchy, genetics being critical for any sort of virtue, etc - just that it doesn't follow racial lines very closely)
cuwurious_strag_CA
2yr ago
Not sure what the point of this post is
That "race determines culture" is just wrong, compare the culture of any race X000 years ago to that of any race today. Vikings to middle managers, aztec blood sacrifices to gardeners, japanese empire to efficient japanese manufacturing systems. Both the american upper-class, intellectuals and scientists and managers, contains a lot of indians, middle easterners, asians, jews, and whites - as do the lower classes - and the culture of the upper-class indians sure is closer to that of the upper-class whites or jews than the lower class indians.
How much does it actually cost to maintain YouTube, cloud hosting, Gmail and Google Search (their only valuable products
Also apps / workspace / education (presumably valuable for the same reason gmail is), and investments in AI (driven by hiring high quality people from hardware to researchers). I'm not sure if chrome, maps, android, and hundreds of other services are 'valuable' in that sense of shareholder value - but should google just drop chrome development or maps?
There's also all the non-coder staff to support operating in 100+ countries, culturally, legally, physical infrastructure, etc, which a small startup needs much less of.
cuwurious_strag_CA
2yr ago
"They were punished lightly by almost any historical standard" is worth noting. (but @ "perhaps, in fact, in the kind of country the rioters might dream of creating", J6 rioters were more enthusiastic trump supporting republicans with some Q people, as opposed to altright or 'new right' or neoreactionaries, afaict)
That's a lot of words, and if he was doing that, it'd be bad, but can you link these broad statements to specific examples when you make them? You linked a few reddit posts and I have no clue how they relate to the above.
Which circumstances, contexts, narratives, what actual positions/concerns are being dismissed, what viewpoints aren't held? I genuinely don't know what you're saying.
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