magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
Why are apparently cooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right?
Zvi calls this the Incorrect Anti-Narrative Contrarian Cluster, and he's had a post about it in IOU status for nearly three years.
Part of the answer has got to be "the right is highly suspicious of running sanity gatekeeping, because all the institutions which were supposed to do that went rogue and abused their power to shut the right out of the conversation".
(Also, you mean "kooky".)
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
· Edited 18d ago
Well, yes, although in most cases only after it destroys all satellites at that height and below. (There is also the requirement that people stop putting new stuff into the Kessler region until the junk does all deorbit - which one would hope would be the case, but who knows.)
magic9mushroom
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19d ago
magic9mushroom
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19d ago
A Boeing satellite exploded into 500 pieces. The worst case scenario in events like this is Kessler syndrome but so far reporting doesn't point to something like this, though early simulations don't look great
This is because it's in the wrong place.
Kessler syndrome is a threat in low Earth orbit - the region right around the globe in that video, up to 2000 km above the surface (note that this is an orbital radius of up to ~8400 km; you are closer to this region than you are to the centre of the Earth). It's a threat because we've put tons and tons of satellites there, on all sorts of different angles and thus at high relative velocities, so there's potential for debris to multiply over time (one satellite blows up, making debris that blows up 10 more satellites, which make debris that blow up 100 more satellites, etc.). Medium Earth orbit and high Earth orbit are far less cluttered, so there's not enough fuel for that sort of chain reaction. Geostationary Earth orbit (where this explosion happened) is a special case - we've put a ton of satellites there, but unlike in LEO, they're all going the same direction (prograde equatorial orbit), so the relative velocities are low and collisions AIUI shouldn't cause the snowballing effect that threatens LEO.
magic9mushroom
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19d ago
To be clear, while generally regulated as a biological weapon due to its origin (it's extracted from the castor plant), ricin is a toxin rather than something that replicates; one is poisoned with ricin, not infected. Anthrax, however, is weaponised as viable spores, which do infect people and replicate inside them (but as noted, anthrax doesn't spread living to living; it's corpses of people/animals that have died of anthrax that spread it to others).
Bioweapons that actually threaten epidemic are generally known to be For Crazy People Only (because, well, once you release one of those it's pot luck whether it comes back to infect your guys too). Stuff like plague (ISIL played around with this a few years back, IIRC, but thankfully they only killed themselves with it) and smallpox (extinct, but the tech exists to bring it back) fall into this category.
magic9mushroom
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19d ago
A few of your notes are missing links - was this an error?
On the one had, a terrorist cooking ricin is a bit alarming. On the other hand, it shows that Al Qaeda doesn't have the chops to do anthrax or bottox. Thoughts?
Ricin is more dangerous than anthrax, because anthrax responds well to treatment and ricin doesn't. There's this interview with Fauci, which I'm having trouble tracking down (I found another one where he talks about it, but it's not the one I'm thinking of), where he says that when he got an envelope that sprayed him with white powder, he immediately figured three possibilities, and his words were something like "1) it's baby powder, and I'll be fine, 2) it's anthrax, and I'm gonna get sick, but I'll take antibiotics and I'll recover, 3) it's ricin, and I'm dead".
Anthrax contamination can be expensive to clean up if there's a lot of it (infamously, the British tested it on an island, and cattle that ate grass there still died from anthrax 70 years later; the way they ended up fixing the site was to strip the topsoil off the entire island and incinerate it), but deaths are rare and epidemic's impossible (because modern Western countries don't leave dead bodies lying around and anthrax doesn't spread living to living).
magic9mushroom
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20d ago
But if we were set back to the technological level of the 1700s, how possible would it be for us to recover to our modern-day level?
Very. Null risk.
I've cited Ord previously on this topic, but I'm feeling lazy today so I'll just quote:
Even if civilization did collapse, it is likely that it could be reestablished. As we have seen, civilization has already been independently established at least seven times by isolated peoples.12 While one might think resource depletion could make this harder, it is more likely that it has become substantially easier. Most disasters short of human extinction would leave our domesticated animals and plants, as well as copious material resources in the ruins of our cities—it is much easier to re-forge iron from old railings than to smelt it from ore. Even expendable resources such as coal would be much easier to access, via abandoned reserves and mines, than they ever were in the eighteenth century. 13 Moreover, evidence that civilization is possible, and the tools and knowledge to help rebuild, would be scattered across the world.
13 Overall the trend is toward resources becoming harder to access, since we access the easy ones first. This is true for untouched resources in the ground. But this leads people to neglect the vast amount of resources that are already in the process of being extracted, that are being stored, and that are in the ruins of civilization. For example, there is a single open-cut coal mine in Wyoming that produces 100 million tons of coal each year and has 1.7 billion tons left (Peabody Energy, 2018). At the time of writing, coal power plants in the US hold 100 million tons of ready-to-use coal in reserve (EIA, 2019). There are about 2 billion barrels of oil in strategic reserves (IEA, 2018, p. 19), and our global civilization contains about 2,000 kg of iron in use per person (Sverdrup & Olafsdottir, 2019).
This is, of course, leaving aside the issue that substantial chunks of the world would be directly untouched by nuclear war (Africa/South America, also probably New Zealand and Ireland), so it's not exactly like literacy will be lost forever in 20 years or something even if rebuilding fails in all the places that are involved.
magic9mushroom
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20d ago
I always suggest turbibg off the voting system,
TheMotte does seem to have homogenised somewhat faster than DSL, and this is an obvious potential cause.
magic9mushroom
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21d ago
The psalms(psalm 95/96 depending on whether you use protestant or Catholic numbering)
Are you talking about this one? Because with the exception of the Wycliffe Bible that doesn't sound very demonic, just impotent.
St Paul repeats this condemnation in his epistles.
I found this, which kinda fits (though note the translation differences); are there others?
magic9mushroom
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21d ago
I can't help but ask: why the real name for Moldbug but pseudonym for BAP? I'm not trying to claim that either choice is evil or anything, it just looks weird to see both styles juxtaposed.
magic9mushroom
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21d ago
By "weird vbulletin forum" do you mean DSL, or...?
I mean, it doesn't actually use vBulletin (it uses Simple Machines Forum), and I wouldn't say it's "less extreme" than theMotte (it's higher-brow and does retain a couple of SJer regulars, but there're still plenty of witches there), but it's the only BBS I'm aware of in the SSC diaspora, so I'm a bit confused.
magic9mushroom
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21d ago
Well, yes, this pattern goes back over a millennium, though I wasn't aware it had gone back quite far enough to wind up in the Bible (I've read some of the Bible, but not all of it).
magic9mushroom
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21d ago
The guy saying we should go private is, if I understand correctly, worried not primarily for theMotte, but worried that the entire Rat movement will be cancelled due to guilt by association with theMotte.
magic9mushroom
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21d ago
Satanism's been around longer than that, it's just that it's a bit hard to maintain a continuous tradition when that tradition gets you set on fire if discovered in the only regions where people actually believe in the object of that tradition.
Pagan religions are not Satanic, though. At least, not unless you're a Christian or Muslim and are looking for a supernatural but non-heretical explanation of their existence (they're too different to be corruptions of the true faith, angels would mention that they're only servants, and rival gods aren't supposed to exist, so by process of elimination...).
magic9mushroom
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21d ago
...unless they're confident that the USA won't intervene, or that they can avoid escalation to nukes like they (barely) did in Korea.
magic9mushroom
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22d ago
· Edited 22d ago
Although you aren't technically replying to me, I feel obliged to note yet again that Is =/= Ought. I have no clue why I keep having to spell this out, and in Rat spaces no less.
I am saying that SJ is, probabilistically, less of a problem because there's a fair chance nuclear war gets rid of it rendering most efforts to fight it moot. I am not saying that mass casualties from nuclear war are good because of this. The past couple of election cycles I've been begging all the parties to do anything about civil defence; I'd have been willing to vote for the Greens if they'd had word one about this.
magic9mushroom
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22d ago
In a scenario where Taiwan goes hot in the near future and the Chinese arsenal is deployed, I'd expect probably a few dozen mushroom clouds over the USA, due to destruction on the ground + ABM + other targets (Taiwan itself, Japan, South Korea, Australia, possibly others). The USA would probably survive, although things'd be tough for a while.
The Russian arsenal, assuming for the sake of argument that it works, is a different kettle of fish.
magic9mushroom
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22d ago
Moreover, nuclear targeting is not done on the basis of a list of largest cities in the enemy’s homeland, it’s done by targeting military and command installations and war critical infrastructure as well as strategic forces. A lot of that is pretty red, although admittedly DC and San Diego are not.
I'd expect both in actual practice; a lot of the point of a deterrent (short of the US/Russian lolhuge arsenals) is that you threaten to go countervalue in response to an attack out of spite, and it's likely that things going nuclear will be the result of a false alarm saying the other side's attempting alpha strike.
magic9mushroom
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22d ago
But I am extremely risk-averse; I can barely psychologically handle the uncertainties of reasonable business investment. "Shares" of anything that can go rapidly to $0 are just too much for me, at least on my current budget.
I understand completely, sharing this aversion to some extent. I wasn't looking to bet you, just to quantify the various dire claims I'm seeing floating around here; as a non-American it's hard to know who to believe, and track records help.
magic9mushroom
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22d ago
A major crux for me is P(WWIII) combined with P(Trump goes senile at some point in this coming term).
Because, let's be real here: if WWIII happens, then dealing with SJ is not very hard. Half their voter base will literally die in a fire. The other half will be discredited by having weakened the West and invited the challenge to them that resulted in WWIII. In-office representatives might try to fight a desperate rearguard to preserve malapportionment, but that's super-doomed. And then the Serious Business tools - constitutional amendments, impeachments, and so on - start getting handed over to the conservatives while they're still hopping mad (even more mad if a malapportionment rearguard had to be crushed). At that point I'd be more worried about White Terror than about Thermidor failing.
Trump being old and too much of a Trump to resign or 25A himself, though, might worsen the Western death toll.
(Which, by the way, I do think is inevitable at this point, if not necessarily without some of what Time once called "fortification" from a "shadow campaign.")
Could I get a confidence level on that prediction?
magic9mushroom
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23d ago
No, it means that "it takes two to tango" and I've never even been on a date.
Oh. I didn't consider that because it sounded potentially fixable and thus not an already-determined failure.
- Being in your 40s isn't as big a deal for men as it is for women attractiveness-wise.
- Even if no-one in the US will take you (which doesn't seem assured), and even though you IIRC are poor, there is still some option of fetching someone from Eastern Europe, SEA or Africa, as your US citizenship itself is fairly valuable. If I were as desperate as you seem to be, this'd be how I'd do it (although admittedly I'd have a much easier time of it).
magic9mushroom
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25d ago
I don't think he's going to become dictator. I think he wouldn't turn it down. I don't think he has a plan to become dictator, because that would be too much planning.
To add on to this for @SlowBoy's benefit: lots of people would take kingship if it were offered. I would, if I were immortal and had some method of avoiding the incentive traps.
Most of them never try to take over a country.
magic9mushroom
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26d ago
I know what you're thinking of, but the Matthew/Luke passages aren't the only lists of random irrelevant people. The Old Testament has plenty of excessive detail (there's a reason people cite Leviticus and Deuteronomy but more rarely Numbers; Numbers is called that because it's almost an accounting ledger).
magic9mushroom
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27d ago
Utilitarianism doesn't work when you're playing an intelligent opponent.
The better formulation is "utilitarianism doesn't work if you're an idiot, because then you can't properly calculate utility". Second-order effects like this are supposed to be included in utilitarian calculations; the fact that a lot of people are too stupid to do this doesn't make the theory wrong, just a bad fit for them.
I will note that it's possible that Harris will still be President, if only for a month or two. All Biden has to do is resign (or die, I suppose).
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