magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
I can only imagine how much more fucked up prohibition would have been if the prohibition side began mass importing Muslims who don't drink, and the anti-prohibition side scoured the globe for alcoholics. And it's hard to imagine either approach making America better off long term, even if the short term culture war issue gets "settled".
You don't need to imagine. I can identify one very obvious example of this in US history i.e. Bleeding Kansas.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
I was already breaking it down into smaller problems; the part I was missing was memoisation to let me do all of those smaller problems only once instead of >9000 times. The algorithm we built would still run in exponential time if I took out the "@cache" on the key function, and if you'd told me memoisation was a thing I'd have probably managed it from there. Necessary and sufficient.
Also, uh, in case you weren't aware, I am Australian, so yes, I do use Commonwealth spelling.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Update on this:
@lagrangian and I discussed this over PM, and he introduced me to the wonderful concept of memoisation, which took the difficulty from exponential to quadratic. So, stuff that would have taken weeks (or millennia) now takes minutes, and I turned this into this in a couple of weeks (most of that being me moving data around and doing formatting).
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
Harris was a weak candidate, though, between being Californian and her race/sex being the things that got her the candidacy.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
I mean, read it all
I read like the first chapter and gave up. Scott's fiction style is something I can only take in small doses.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
All but 8/10/12/13. 18 might have a rationalist meaning I'm not familiar with, though, and I think recognise Yeerk as being an Animorphs reference.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
· Edited 5d ago
Possibly Meditations on Moloch (Ctrl-F "slave" to get to the relevant part) or Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs (Ctrl-F "useful work" to get to the relevant part).
Note that neither of these makes the full claim that if you've got people sitting around whom you have to supervise and feed anyway, you can't extract useful labour from most/any of them. The first makes the much weaker claim that owning slaves-for-life is not the most cost-effective way of getting work done (vs. allowing the slaves to earn their freedom), and the second makes the weaker claim that there exist people from whom useful labour cannot be extracted (and even there, I will note that he did not consider the "job" of "low-class prostitute", probably because that's illegal in 49/50 states of the USA and also significantly dystopian).
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
Australia: 16/17 depending on state (16 in the four biggest states).
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
· Edited 5d ago
I don't know who this Lomez guy is or what the wider context was of him giving the advice of pairing up with 170-pound women.
The linked post wasn't his. It was from some guy called "Labrador Skeptic".
I suspect this advice boils down to "ignore the factor of sexual attraction when looking for a mate", which I find questionable at best.
I've got to say, I find this whole discussion kind of hilarious, now that I've done the maths (not American, so I don't think in pounds), as I find (average-white-height) women of that weight quite attractive.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
· Edited 5d ago
I don't usually express* violent disgust or other anger-adjacent emotions on the Web, but I didn't get in any trouble for this despite it pretty much being a disgust-only top-level post. Avoid hyperbolic language (especially calling people or ideas by snarl words like "parasite"), and obviously avoid specific incitement or threats of violence. Helps a lot if your disgust isn't with your interlocutor in particular, though.
*NB: I choose the word "express" carefully. Checking offsite records, there is at least one time my first reaction to a reply notification here was "take a swim in H2SO4". I just, um, didn't actually post that, because it wouldn't have been very productive.
@Amadan: I guess this might be sort of what you were looking for? It wasn't aimed at you, though.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
Presumably that she spends too much time on 4chan to the extent that her perception is skewed by a similar degree to being literally intoxicated.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
Empirically, social media shitposts about assaulting someone are not true threats.
Unless I'm missing something, we're talking about advocacy of assassination, not ITG threats of assassination. If you write a post telling people to do X, there's a possibility that people might read your post and do X. This is unfortunately true even if you weren't being serious. Hence, it is not unreasonable to be concerned about a high volume of people advocating X when X is "assassinating a high-ranked government official".
It is also not unreasonable to be concerned about the possibility of the culture war boiling over into mass violence in the USA, regardless of one's side in that war (if any). I'm thus not seeing the relevance of the tu quoque; I'm trying to get a better read on P(Boogaloo), not trying to score points.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
It seems likely the Democrats will obtain control of the House in 2026 and probably the whole enchilada in 2028,
I think you're underestimating the capability for current trends to get scrambled; we live in Interesting Times.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
Calls for the murder of Elon Musk are frequent and widespread.
For clarification: is this still only randoms on social media, or are there notable figures/organisations taking this stance as well? (Not saying randoms on social media are harmless, but there's a major difference in degree there.)
I will note that while I'm also quite concerned about the situation in the 'States, there are widely-varying threat levels among Western nations. I don't see Australia collapsing even if given a hard shove, for instance. Canada and Europe seem to be somewhere in-between.
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
If he's old enough that a progress of months is enough to make meaningful differences in his cognition then he was not of sound mind to be president.
I feel obliged to note that this isn't necessarily the way it works. If he had a stroke between then and now, for instance, that's a sudden loss of brain function regardless of what that function was before the stroke. Hell, if he had a stroke before the use of the autopen affecting his motor control, that would explain why he couldn't sign his name without necessarily implying anything about his cognition.
Cognitive decline is not always gradual, and loss of motor control without cognitive decline is a thing (see: Stephen Hawking, who certainly wasn't a vegetable).
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
A lot of people would rather the government focus on policy than on scandals. They don't care about Biden's dementia or the J6 Committee's conduct; they care about what Trump can do for them in the here and now.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
As long as it's clear that blaming China openly will not help with either cleanup or preventing further accidents, there's no point in doing it. If China says (through less-than-public channels) that yeah, we screwed up, we're sorry, let's stop the blame game and instead let's think how to handle the mess, it makes practical sense to play along.
Do want to note here that there is always one way to absolutely prevent further accidents which does absolutely require openly blaming China i.e. starting WWIII. Fucking around with pandemic pathogens in insecure ways is one of the things where that option does have to be considered; consider the death toll that would have resulted if COVID had had the case fatality rate of plague.
I said at the time something along the lines of "I sure hope it's not an actual bioweapon use, because if it is that's casus belli". I stand by that conditional. The actual situation is not quite at that level.
I do think you're being a naïve first-order consequentialist here, though. Lies are never free. Even leaving aside RenOS's good points regarding levers (and sure, Chinese popular opinion has little effect on PRC government actions, but Western popular opinion has an effect on Western government demands which do have an effect on PRC government actions), our institutions going along with this damaged popular trust in them, which is a big deal. The WHO is trusted far less these days because it bent over backwards to play the PRC's tune. Wikipedia had a crisis over this issue which led to a near-complete purge of conservatives via Parable of Lightning, damaging its legitimacy. The US's dissident right grew, raising the likelihood of a civil war there. These are not small costs.
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
But within reason, I generally lean on the side of privileging the freedom of the (public) artist, regardless of the aesthetic preferences of the public who will be exposed to their work. If it's that important to you, then you should consider becoming an artist too. And if it's not sufficiently important to you, then you are at the mercy of the people to whom it was sufficiently important.
I'm not sure that this is coherent. If the artist has the freedom to put a sculpture of a gory corpse outside my house against my will, because that fits his conception of beauty, then do I not have the freedom to melt down his sculpture with a blowtorch against his will, because that fits my conception of beauty? Am I not also an artist, for making the world around me more beautiful as I see it?
You might say "well, he got approval from the government and you didn't", but since we're presupposing that the public agrees with me, and since this is presumably a democratic government that is supposed to follow the public will, for the government to give him and not me approval is an obvious bug, not intended behaviour.
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
For 20+ years, in peace time, thousands, possibly tens of thousands of professionals engaged in Nazi/Imperial Japan style extremely unethical human experimentation.
Extremely unethical, yes, but still not quite on the level of Mengele or Ishii.
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
I think that either of die Linke or AfD would demand even more than the Grüne demands now.
I'm not so sure about that in AfD's case, although it's still a non-starter AIUI because the SPD and Greens would pull out to maintain the cordon.
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
I accept it is plausible that climate change will cause human extinction within a few decades. The same is plausible for nuclear war, an asteroid impact, a superbug, a super-volcano, renegade AI, et. al.
Nuclear war: no, there's no mechanism that lets you get to extinction. Nuclear winter is literally a hoax, blast/heat/local fallout are too localised, and global fallout's too weak (I ran the numbers on Cold War arsenals and those weren't nearly enough). It could get to #2 on the list of "disasters in history by %humanity killed", but #1 is dubious, let alone X.
Supervolcano: another Yellowstone wouldn't do it (this is known fact; humanity already survived Yellowstone three times before we even tamed dogs). Another Siberian Traps might, admittedly.
Climate change/superbug: not in the normal senses. A normal pandemic can't get everyone because R drops below 1 before #humans reaches 0. The only "superbug" (i.e. infectious agent) that could get actual everyone is a full-blown insect-zombifier-for-humans where victims actively and intelligently attempt to infect others (rabies and toxoplasma are nowhere near precise enough), and that's highly implausible without intelligent design (there's nothing with this level of precision in any mammal, and it's generally thought to get harder with brain size). For climate change to get us would require, well, another Siberian Traps, or a Chicxulub+ impact (another Chicxulub wouldn't do it, due to preppers if nothing else), or some omnicidal maniac deliberately manufacturing and releasing millions of tonnes of fluorocarbons; I'm specifically not including "some idiot blocked out the Sun with a solar shade" because people would notice that and destroy it (with massive casualties, but not X).
Asteroid impact: technically no (at least not without terrorist redirection), but in practice I'll grant this one (we've found all the Earth-crossing asteroids of sufficient size and ruled out collisions, but comets are harder to predict). Low probability, though, particularly given the requirement for a Chicxulub+ one.
AI can do it. Life 2.0 can do it (here I'm thinking of things like a non-digestible alga that doesn't need phosphate and has better-than-RuBisCO photosynthesis, not a pathogen - an independent lifeform that terraforms the planet in ways that are incompatible with human survival, in this case by causing a superglaciation plus total failure of open-air crops). New physics catastrophes and terrorist geoengineering might do it, although I'd be more concerned about those on the scale of centuries rather than decades. And obviously there's the "unknown unknown" term which is unknowable by definition. But AI and Life 2.0 are the known X-risks that scare me. (Obviously there are GCRs that are significantly more likely than any X-risk. Nuclear war's highly likely to occur sometime this century if we don't get X first; I just expect not only people to survive but myself to survive.)
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
· Edited 12d ago
You need another premise to get that conclusion, specifically "light-cone-breaking FTL is impossible".
Nobody knows whether this is true. The "light-cone-breaking FTL = time travel to times before the creation of the time machine = lol where are the time travellers" issue is not a clear no-go, as current understanding of relativity and quantum physics suggests that any attempt to use FTL to build a time machine would fail due to the quantum vacuum misbehaving and collapsing your FTL method at the exact instant time travel becomes possible.
magic9mushroom
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15d ago
Trump isn't flying blind because the sensemaking institutions he inherited are so corrupted as to be worthless. He is flying blind because he is an unrigorous vibes-based thinker.
Scott, "Planet-Sized Nutshell":
There is an extraordinarily useful pattern of refactored agency in which you view humans as basically actors playing roles determined by their incentives. Anyone who strays even slightly from their role is outcompeted and replaced by an understudy who will do better.
In a sense it's both. The reason Trump is that way is because he's Trump. Why is Trump POTUS, though, rather than losing the Republican nomination back in 2016? Well, because all the sensemaking institutions said "Don't nominate Trump" and the Republican base treated that as an endorsement. "Be a huckster" was no longer a losing strategy to get the Republican nomination, because the Republican base no longer trusted the institutions that normally filtered out hucksters, because those institutions by then also filtered out anyone loyal to the Red Tribe; indeed, the base went so far as to anti-trust the institutions and deliberately do the opposite of what they said.
magic9mushroom
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15d ago
· Edited 15d ago
An attempt at synthesis of your point and FC's (plus some others, like Zvi's notion of the Incorrect Anti-Narrative Contrarian Cluster): Governments in the 90s (or whenever) were Right. SJ governments were Wrong. Trump and Musk seem to be Not Even Wrong.
At greater length: there used to be coherence-producing mechanisms in society that kept everybody on the same page and kept policy making sense. Then when SJ nucleated, it hijacked nearly all those mechanisms and put false stuff into them, leading to obvious falsehoods being promulgated (and multiplying due to the principle of explosion) and policies that didn't work. The Trumpian reaction to SJ realised that it could not restore neutrality in those mechanisms (because SJ did too good a job of installing political commissariats in them) and it was excluded from the Overton Window those mechanisms had produced, so it took a sledgehammer to their credibility and turned much of the right-wing against them. However, it failed to build new coherence-producing mechanisms to replace them*, leaving much of its base and apparently also Trump/Musk without any way of identifying and co-ordinating on truth and on rational planning; they're just saying things. And, well, a government that's working with no map at all is going to do worse at a large number of things than one with a map that loosely resembles but does not match the territory.
Of course, a little buffoonery until Trumpism can sort itself out wouldn't be the end of the world... except that we have a certain drooling dragon at the door watching our every move, which means it might actually be the end of the world as we know it. Oh, well, I live in Bendigo and have most of my prep done**; "I'm clear. Are you?"
@FCfromSSC, thoughts?
*There are rightist intellectuals capable of identifying truth, and there now is an alt-media apparatus capable of dispensing it. The problem is that one isn't plugged into the other - not in the USA, at least, although we seem to be doing a lot better in Oz (the UAP is showing some signs of Trumpian brain rot, but it's not even our biggest alt-right party, so I'm not very worried). A lot of us were counting on Musk and Vance to be lynchpins, but Musk appears to have gone nuts and I haven't heard much about Vance in all this.
**There's a reasonable amount that's best left to "when the war starts" because it's got downsides and/or a use-by date plus isn't panic-buying bait.
Who is "you"?
SJ is very trigger-happy and has weak leadership; there is for the most part no "you" that actually has the security in power to take the locally-disincentivised action and actually make the mob follow along (rather than simply being replaced).
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