magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Data Secrets Lox, another SSC spinoff forum (which also leans right, although perhaps less heavily than theMotte).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Even a place like Nashville is diversifying as it grows.
This seems to be suggesting the opposite causal direction to what you're claiming - that growth/dynamism causes diversity, rather than that diversity causes growth/dynamism.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
China's not exactly doing great.
No, they're quite (horribly) effective at imperialism. Remember that just because Chinese territory is contiguous doesn't mean it's not an empire; China proper, peopled by Han, looks like this. Xinjiang and Tibet, at least (I'm less sure about Inner Mongolia and Manchuria), are not very happy with being ruled by the PRC, but it's doing them little good because they're brutally occupied.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
To build on what @Incanto said:
Even without taking OpenAI's charter into account, I have no motivation to buy stock in a company that's trying for singularity. Leaving aside the question of whether I think that company is instead going to end the world (and I do), assuming for the sake of argument that they'll succeed in getting controllable superintelligence...
...what process exactly is paying me my dividends? Control of a singularity event, in a relatively-short timeframe, gives sovereignty. Yes, the law says that I can replace them if they don't pay me, but the law will have no power over them if they succeed, because singularity rapidly means they outgun the government. They can just turn around and stiff me and I've got no recourse; only direct control of the AI matters.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
I think that you're mischaracterising the thought process of climate activists. They're not pretending to care about the climate. They do actually care about it. It's just that most of the loud ones also have a bunch of other causes and are unwilling to "sully" themselves by compromising any of their other causes in order to more effectively oppose global warming. You can't do nuclear, because radiation is bad. You can't subsidise corporations without DIE, because DIE is important. And on it goes.
They're absolutely guilty of refusing to accept "impure" solutions, and thus of refusing to think realistically, but it's not intended as a Trojan Horse.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
AI doomers, take note - if you're not willing to do this, as insane as Big Yud's missile strike proposal sounded in practice - then it's basically a moot point.
Yep, absolutely. For Butlerian Jihad to work, there has to be total escalation dominance, where trying to build AGI is banned everywhere, and any government that doesn't enforce that ban is knocked over and replaced with one that will. If a great power tries to not enforce it, the RoW has to have the willingness to go all the way:
RoW: You aren't enforcing the AI ban.
GP: Fuck you, we'll do what we want.
RoW: If you don't start enforcing the AI ban, we'll nuke you.
GP: If you nuke us, we'll nuke you back.
RoW: We know, but being nuked isn't as bad as getting exterminated by AI, so we've got nothing to lose.
GP: You're bluffing.
RoW: *launches nukes*
That's the goal line. Nothing short of that mindset will work, even if in practice I suspect that it could be implemented without requiring an actual nuclear war due to the limited number of great powers that need to get on board or decide not to force the matter (I have essentially zero hope that it could be implemented without war at all, but I think it could plausibly be just a few small and notoriously-defiant countries which have to be knocked over).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Pieces like this are pretty eye-opening for me.
*looks into recent Greens actions*
Oh Jesus, what the fuck? I haven't been paying enough attention to domestic politics; we had our own Parliament invasion?! And this China article is a lot crazier than I was crediting them with being; I was talking about this interview years back, where he at least does agree that the PRC is doing terrible things but thinks that talking to them is going to make them stop and implies we want to sit out WWIII. Outright pro-China rhetoric... well, that raises some ugly possibilities, most notably "the Greens may have been bought" and more generally an upward adjustment in P(organised sabotage campaign|Australia joins WWIII).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
I used to be a Greens voter, actually; it's only lately that they've lost me (both because I've swung toward conservatism and because they've gotten into SJ). Prior to SJ, and in the 90s/00s when great-power conflict wasn't such a big deal, their big policies amounted to environmentalism (which I mostly agree with), social democracy (which I agree with) and marijuana legalisation (which I agree with, although I've never used it personally). But yeah, wanting to ban opposing parties (even if for now it's only minor ones; come on, we've all read that poem in school) is an immediate "welcome to just above the bottom of my preference list, right above single-issue parties whom I think are pushing the wrong way on that single issue (e.g. the Animal Justice Party, since I oppose animal rights)". I was already pretty cross with them over their peacenik tendencies (they're opposed to our alliance with the USA, basically hoping to let the US do the dying for our freedom in WWIII, and I think that's dishonourable), but wanting to ban opposition parties is "no way, no how, this risks irrevocable harm" territory.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
Still not sure why people are going back to a half assed comment.
Well, I can't speak for @Crowstep, of course (perhaps he uses the "Comments" feed and saw my post?), but in my case it was that I did a search for "stop at the neck" since I wanted to find an old post I'd written that used the phrase, and happened across yours on the way since it was more recent.
I'm always surprised that Neanderthals have gotten such bad marketing, when it would be fairly easy to play them as the lost super race, scientifically.
Well, the thing is that that interpretation only really became coherent in 2010, when it was proven that whites and Asians are Neanderthal in significant part but not whole. Neanderthals were first thought to be our full ancestors (and thus no particular master race, plausibly less intelligent than modern descendants due to intervening selection), and then thought to have been yet another dead branch (and thus the same sort of thing as Australopithecus/Paranthropus robustus, who absolutely deserve the reputation of pop-culture Neanderthals). And, well, to state the obvious, by 2010 "whites and Asians are, as a whole, intellectually superior to sub-Saharan Africans because they have Neanderthal blood; Neanderthals were the real 'Numenoreans'" - which is the claim we're talking about, stated plainly - was something that mainstream journalism and big-budget fiction wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.
(To be clear, I'm agnostic on that claim; there aren't any obvious reasons it can't be true, but the well of research on the topic has been so badly poisoned by both sides that it would be foolish to be confident in almost any claim in the area without having done the research oneself. I'm merely stating, descriptively, why it is not part of the pop-culture understanding of Neanderthals.)
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
I feel similarly when people tell me that HBD is obviously true, because "evolution didn't stop at the neck;" then are shocked Pikachu when people start dusting off the conniving greedy Jew stereotype and say "no no no we were just talking about IQ!"
TBH, I'm much less predisposed to believe HBD claims about Jews (in either direction) than sub-Saharan Africans (or *nesians), simply because of the shorter timescales. With sub-Saharan Africans there's a fairly-long timescale and lack of Neanderthal admixture; with *nesians there's Denisovan admixture. Neanderthals and Denisovans had almost a million years to diverge, and Out of Africa II was ~70,000 years ago (with additional time if you're comparing to West or South Africans due to divergence within Africa); Jews are what, 4,000 years old at best?
n'est pas
"n'est-ce pas". "n'est pas" is pronounced approximately "nay pah" and means "isn't"; "n'est-ce pas?" is pronounced approximately "ness pah" and means "is it not?"
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
then things like outright elimination of aging being on the agenda, at which point even very low TFRs become no big deal.
Technically, no. Elimination of aging (and menopause) avoids the problem via drastically increasing TFR*, not by making very low TFR irrelevant. Even the Culture still needs a TFR of 1** to avoid dying out; it's just that 380 years of fertility make TFR 1 pretty easy.
*In particular, it moves female fertility from Mediocristan to Extremistan; even if only a small fraction of people decide to pop out four hundred babies, it has a rather-large effect.
**1 rather than slightly over 2, because all Culture citizens can bear children instead of slightly under half of them (they are sequential hermaphrodites).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Thank you.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
What is "CHNV"?
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
I'd peg this as more like 80 than 70. You've got to take into account the social compounding, where information is not passed on accurately.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
The weird bit for me, as a libertarian/alt-lite, is that the outcome I really, really don't want is specifically the election landing in the middle; I do not want a Labour minority government with the Greens, because lol the Greens are now enemies of liberal democracy (they want hate speech laws and to ban a couple of political parties for opposing SJ). Labour majority isn't too bad, and Coalition majority isn't too bad; I just don't want Labour minority.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Australia's kind of a special case because IRV+compulsory voting means that the two big parties wind up very close to each other, so aside from scandals there isn't really that much to go on.
Of course, while Labour did win, their primary vote was historically low and the Greens nibbled away at Brisbane; the tactic worked, but it could easily have left Albanese leading a minority government (and, well, good luck lasting more than one term while also placating the Greens; they've gone bananas).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Note that doing this tends to mean that the top-level house is very one-sided; anything that relies on a supermajority (or on a large-enough majority to absorb a significant fraction of conscientious objectors) will be available far more often. As such, it's relatively easy for this to turn into a dominant-party system.
The most-well-known example of this system at present is literally the PRC, although in that case this isn't the only control preventing other parties from competing.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
The most plausible scenario i've seen is where Germany simply avoids declaring war on the USSR, and coordinates better with Japan to avoid provoking the US.
The problem there is the Japanese oil crunch. With Britain, the Netherlands and the USA all embargoing Japan and guaranteeing each other's colonies, there weren't really a lot of good options for the Japanese. Also, Roosevelt wanted a war and was already giving substantial aid to the British; while Pearl Harbour certainly made things much easier for him, it's not certain that Roosevelt couldn't have dragged the USA in anyway.
(As it actually happened, of course, Hitler was high on meth and wanted to declare war on the USA, so what we're positing here is a saner Hitler as well as the Japanese listening to him.)
Avoiding invading Russia, yeah, that could be done.
If they could take Malta, Gibralter, and the Suez,
If. Historians are split on whether the logistics could be stretched far enough to let Rommel reach the Suez, even with ~unlimited troops due to no Barbarossa.
Bear in mind that 1940s fission bombs were not all that powerful. They were devastating to Hiroshima because that was a densely packed city of thin wood and paper. The brick/cement buildings of Germany were actually pretty resistant to bombing, which was part of why the strategic bombing campaign never worked as well as the allies hoped. So it's plausible we could have gotten a 1984 style world where they are regularly getting hit by nuclear bombs, but people survive and life goes on.
Not as powerful, no (although hollow pits were considered at Manhattan, just not deployed by war's end). They're not "city off the map" unless the city is made of paper. But they're a hell of a lot more effective than TNT and once the production line had spun up the losses would become unacceptable.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
It's very difficult to look at many of the decisions that were made by conquering German and Japanese armies in the first phases of WWII, and not think to oneself that if they had just relaxed their racial hierarchy stuff a liiiiiitle bit, maybe they could have gotten some of their conquered peoples to buy into the project a little bit, and then they would have won the war quite easily.
I mean, AFAICS you need all of:
- Szilard/Fermi not going over (note the very early PoD there); that removes the Boom Clock (or potentially puts it on the Nazi side, although Hitler would also have to fund them and resource them). The USA in particular is almost impossible to conquer by 1945, so unless the Boom Clock is out of the picture the Axis auto-loses (yes, yes, no ICBMs yet, but nuclear bombers are still almost unstoppable).
- The Vichy fleet in Axis hands (rather than scuttled during Fall Anton). Even this is not naval superiority, not by a long way, but it would help a lot (remember, as Napoleon learned, you can beat the British on land as many times as you like and you still won't be able to force a conclusion unless you have a huge navy - the same goes for the USA against anyone other than Britain).
- The Battle of Britain not being thrown away by Goering. This and the Vichy fleet are utterly necessary if Sealion is to ever be a thing, and Sealion's the only way to knock out Britain. The Vichy fleet is needed to cut the British "naval supremacy" down to "naval superiority", and the intact Luftwaffe and ruined RAF are needed for air superiority to counteract that naval superiority; one or the other is not enough. Even then, it's not assured to work; those are just prerequisites.
- And, yeah, the Soviets need to be beaten as well, although Nazi victory in Russia was much closer to happening than Sealion or the Uranverein succeeding and I actually agree that not doing Generalplan Ost might actually have sufficed.
On the Japanese side... again, the land stuff is kind of a sideshow. Indeed, the Japanese actually were doing pretty well on land the whole time, at least until the last few days when the Soviets invaded Manchuria. And none of the places they conquered really had the industry to contribute to the sea/air fight out in the Pacific - at best, they could have reallocated manufacturing toward the sea theatre from a calmer land theatre.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Google still has a lot longer archives than DDG if you're looking for old forum posts and such; I frequently wind up resorting to Google after DDG fails.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Using Google Search and Google services on a Google browser (i.e. all of them except Firefox and Safari) is a bit too centralized
I mean, yes and no. Having a lot of orgs have some of your data is worse from a privacy perspective than one org having all your data, because usually "some" is enough and then you have more possible points where somebody could use it against you (or be hacked by somebody who will).
From a "transition cost" perspective... well, Google's unlikely to block you from search and I'm not sure they even can block you from Chrome.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
To your basic question of "why specifically this year", the answer is probably "Elon Musk bought Twitter and this is one of the fruits". Prior to that, this was a banned opinion in mainstream venues, so of course the mainstream didn't hear it much.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Are "blocked Taiwanese officials from having access to the governor’s office" and "quashed meetings with Taiwanese officials" not the same thing in different words? Why list the same item twice?
I think the first one might be "literally didn't let them into the building" and the second might be "deleted appointments from the governor's schedule".
"Why" is that Data Secrets Lox was founded in the time between SSC's closure and ACX's opening, and not everybody suddenly evicted from SSC's comments wanted to move to the subreddits (this was before theMotte left Reddit). I was a member on DSL before I was a Motte member, for instance, because I didn't have (and didn't want to get) a Reddit account. It's not a "Motte for different politics".
It's also not specifically for culture war, although it allows it.
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