mitigatedchaos
No bio...
User ID: 1767
mitigatedchaos
3mo ago
If the room is suicidal, then it takes someone who actively refuses to "read the room," and doesn't give a shit how impolite that is, to reject suicide.
Does that impose selection effects? Oh, yes.
The Bush administration were neither anti-racist enough not to bomb Afghanistan, nor racist enough to conclude that development of Afghanistan would require imposing radical social change, but in an uncanny valley where liberal democracy is perceived as the natural order of the universe, so American interventionism is morally cheap.
Western elites are stuck in group think because, reasonably enough, none of them want to be the guy to break the perceived inter-ethnic peace and cause a massive conflict. To get someone willing to point out that Haiti is a massive ongoing disaster, we had to search very far outside the typical distribution of politicians.
Thus, you are having the undignified experience of being rescued by a professional wrestler.
His intervention is better viewed as a lucky chance, to be exploited, than a done deal.
What we're probably going to have to do is rebuild the philosophical basis for liberalism from a stage 5 (post-formal) moral perspective, focused on epistemic limits and epistemic humility. Conventional philosophical liberals are having trouble explaining why their principles exist.
mitigatedchaos
4mo ago
Yes, terminating competing land claims if there are no survivors, but not terminating land claims if there are survivors, encourages leaving no survivors.
Thus de-extinction - the land claims return even if there were no survivors.
mitigatedchaos
4mo ago
that was part of the critique of the appeal to realism.
If you're doing that approach, make that it's a critique of sticking solely to the "realist" framework clearer next time.
mitigatedchaos
4mo ago
I feel it's the other way around.
It's strange to make the argument without providing the numbers. If the number of deaths is something like 1%, then that makes the argument stronger, and if it's 50%, the country is facing a demographic collapse even if it wins.
You provided a bunch of intermediate nodes without anchoring them to the particulars of the situation. The absence is conspicuous, as if the argument were deliberately structured to avoid providing the number.
What percentage do you think it is?
mitigatedchaos
4mo ago
Should I assume this means that you don't know?
I want to judge for myself. What is the number?
mitigatedchaos
4mo ago
The question was not rhetorical. What's the actual percentage? "Not enough" isn't specific enough.
mitigatedchaos
4mo ago
What percentage of Ukrainian men aged 18-35 are dead?
mitigatedchaos
4mo ago
That's part of the Trump joke.
All they would have to do is stop lying to each other so much and govern like they care about the country, and he'd be non-viable. All they would have to do is flatter the guy a bit and they could get plenty of legislation.
But they won't.
mitigatedchaos
5mo ago
Personally, I think you're overestimating the rate of progress by underestimating the implicit amount of compute in "the majority of all public digitized text produced by humans," though I could be wrong. (The big thing is that the space of logical statements is unlimited, but most of that space is low/zero-value in practice; human-written text is rich with human intentionality, which helps rapidly reduce the possibility space to something more manageable.)
What I've been looking for is a replacement for UBI, based on the likelihood that it may create a dependent class who see no other means to get more money aside from politically agitating for a higher UBI, which meant it could get wildly out of whack relative to actual production levels.
Basically, looking at the AI revolution, in theory, if you could always subsistence farm, you would almost always be better off for the existence of it (assuming it doesn't wipe you out with superstimulus, etc etc), but without that you could be outbid on rents for land and materials, resulting in loss of basic life support and zero surplus to buy things with.
Thus the target for redistribution emerges: redistribute land and material rents (tuned for neutral population growth on an inherited basis), and allow a build-up of wealth in the form of capital, and everyone is better off for the high production levels but people can still get rich. If the AI-users aren't using lots of land or materials then you don't get much passive income (if any), but you're not blocked from supporting yourself. If the AI-users produce ridiculous amounts and start renting out huge areas for country estates, then you capture those rents from that increased production and can go live in an apartment without issue.
mitigatedchaos
5mo ago
I agree, Deepseek-67B is a match for llama2-70b, in my experience.
Additionally, based on my experience, both Deepseek 67b and Nous Capybara 34b based on Yi-34b are much better politically - I don't just mean in terms of conditioned responses, although that does make llama2-70b not useful for fiction writing, but rather there's an element of strategic thinking missing from llama2 that doesn't show up even in "uncensored" versions, as if it's missing from the training data.
mitigatedchaos
5mo ago
Haven't checked recently, but I've seen different figures - either similar, or less.
I suspect reports that it's substantially less than the average are underreporting, while reports that it's around the average are probably more accurate. I'd wager it's 2x the baseline or less. I don't believe the reports of a "trans genocide" in terms of literal murders. Arguing that prohibition of medical services constitutes a major psychological risk factor would be the more fruitful line of inquiry if someone were trying to put together a case.
mitigatedchaos
5mo ago
If someone is actually smart and self-aware, and then bans all research into like, aircraft development for some reason, then they will integrate the knowledge of that ban back into their information system.
If you ban aircraft research, then you know that you do not know aircraft capabilities, and will adjust your thinking accordingly.
Failing to reintegrate their information control back as uncertainty is not an argument in favor of Democratic governance.
mitigatedchaos
5mo ago
The actual escalation was a 10-year push to legalize racial discrimination against the country's ethnic majority, with no evidence that this would do any good for society, or ever stop.
This is an Iraq War tier screw-up. If Democrats were facing an actual world-historical political genius instead of a WWE character, they would be utterly fucked.
All of these actions are meant for one purpose - to avoid necessary reform.
Back in the 1970s, it was still early, and the exact amount by which the racial gaps could be closed was still speculative, so implying that they could close the gaps was speculation rather than a lie. As late as 2010, they still had relatively serious academics like Roland Fryer, or people studying lead exposure, who were able to show some modest results, and they weren't trying to do "race conscious" policy, so they didn't need the higher standard of evidence that explicitly racial policy requires.
Since then it's been wall-to-wall accusations like "there are too many white and asian men at Google" based on numbers that are completely made up, and attempts at racially discriminatory institutional and government policy that has to be stopped by the courts.
They have been lying to their base since 2014 about what is feasible for them to accomplish, and expecting everyone else to just take the heat.
January 6, a political riot following a year of weaponized political rioting, is not important. Democrats either do not believe that Donald Trump poses any significant risk of a fascist takeover, or they believe that being racist is more important than avoiding risk of a fascist takeover. If it were otherwise, they would simply stop being racist.
If you think you're facing down an ultra-fascist, then you capitulate to moderates and give in to their demands in order to push the potential fascist power base below 50%. You do not double down on weird HR-ified collective inherited racial guilt for the majority of the population.
Russian disinformation accusations are irrelevant. Russian collusion accusations are irrelevant. There is no reason to believe either of them from a party who are so desperate to be racist for no other reason than to selfishly gain and preserve power. Again, the stuff they support is not based on science. Kendi and DiAngelo are not scientists. Collapsing all of race into "W vs BIPOC" doesn't even match regular stats, it's just nasty in/out racial coalition politics.
If you disagree, then you can explain how this garbage, which would be recognized as far right if it were occurring in the other direction, gets stopped.
Not going to get into specifics, but beyond a certain point, the kinds of things you can hypothetically achieve through population selection are things like a reduced crime rate (which can also be achieved through simply imprisoning criminals for doing crimes), and increased quality and quantity of material goods and services (with declining marginal returns - the next 1,000 sqft of house provides less value than the first).
Japan and Singapore are both known for their low rate of crime, high rate of production, and reproductive sterility.
In other words, as the moral price of population selection rises, the theoretical returns decline. Certainty of returns is also reduced, and quite frankly, could you trust e.g. contemporary Canada to run such a program without trying to use it to shut down dissent?
Declining returns, high moral prices, substantial uncertainty, questions about misuse of power... this sort of consideration favors limits on tactics.
The situation with support for nasty racial/ethnic coalition politics by the Democrats is so bad that it actually isn't clear that forcing TikTok to divest from China will be a net benefit in the medium to long term. If the general direction continues, it will be so out of control by mid-century that Xi Jinping Thought will look reasonable by comparison.
In theory, e.g. environmentalism can be positive sum, but they can't stop screwing up construction projects. Unions, administrators, or environmentalists - at least one group of the democratic coalition must take the loss.
I don't trust Republicans do e.g. properly run groups that monitor for radium in road salt. But at the same time, if those organizations divert resources from checking for radioactivity to the left-identitarian omni-cause, then we are not looking at an even a maintenance of the status quo, but a loss.
We have tried asking nicely for Democrats to stop supporting "corrective" racism, and they always refuse. I don't see how anything other than imposing consequences on them will work. The personnel and programs responsible must be defunded, and de facto legal liability must be increased.
It's unclear what the Democrats will do if they win, because they can't promise anything as they have almost no more positive-sum, or even zero-sum, gains to make. Almost everything they do from here on out, unless someone in the Democratic coalition actually acts as a leader and e.g. shuts down the Left-NIMBYs and greenmailers, is negative-sum, and against a particular ethnic group and sexual identity.
If Trump goes to prison, but Democratic leadership shut that negative-sum behavior down and can manage to just be normal for 20 years, then I think there are few consequences to them for jailing Trump.
But they've put so much effort into avoiding necessary reforms and avoiding having tough conversations, that it's hard to believe that they'll suddenly act like mature leaders governing the nation in the broad national interest.
If they don't shape up, the question is just how much abuse bright young cis heterosexual males (of left-discriminated-against racial or ethnic categories) are willing to take before they decide to organize for their own advantage, just as Democrats tell every other group to organize for their own advantage.
A lot of paranoia within Social Justice seems rooted in the understanding that these men really aren't organizing for their own interests right now, but would be a powerful force if they did so in the future, and thus wants to weaken this category based on an implicit theory of inevitable identitarian conflict, rather than pursuing a more peaceful solution which avoids creating incentives for conflict.
mitigatedchaos
7mo ago
I don't think ethnic conflict theory will ever go away, because there's a share of the human personality space that are susceptible to it.
However, we are currently rolling out the first generation of commercial gene therapy. If we can postpone the next identitarian push until 2044, it will likely be happening in an environment where people default to the idea that genes can be changed. In that case, if something is genetic, that doesn't mean someone's entire line of descendants are doomed to suffer from it indefinitely.
mitigatedchaos
8mo ago
Guns matter if the state isn't completely unified, which is plausible in a civil war scenario.
Additionally, once a civil war starts, foreign powers may ship in heavier weaponry to their preferred factions. Guns buy time for this to occur.
You're thinking in terms of Walmart shooters, who are individuals with low human capital reacting in a way that they find self-satisfying, but which lacks tactical or strategic sense. I am not going to discuss the "correct" use of guns in a civil war scenario, but in the event it's more than a very small rebellion, the violence will be directed by significantly more competent individuals than Walmart shooters.
mitigatedchaos
9mo ago
I'm not discussing most other plans at this time.
In the meantime, the mainblog will soon be shutting down for a six-month hiatus.
mitigatedchaos
9mo ago
On August 12th of 2023, I made a post criticizing Hitler's behavior, titled Re: The National Body, based on Bryan Caplan's reading of Hitler's book indicating an ideological system that believes in the inevitability of Malthusian total war. In a later post on February 24th of 2024, responding to an anon that said I came off as New Right, in addition to describing a 2x2 matrix of outcomes for genetic engineering, I also wrote,
Hitler apparently thought the world was going to be consumed by Malthusian total war, and that the only thing to do was to win. However, in many developed countries the fertility rate has been below replacement since around 1973, or for about fifty years as of 2024.
World War 2 started in 1939. Hitler killed millions of people. 1973 was a mere 34 years away.
There are some reasons to believe that the force of envy, which is as old as humanity, will overwhelm the ability of the production system to sustain itself, and the political ability of the defenders of the production system to protect that system. However, treating that as a certainty makes little sense.
Until very recently, it was effectively not possible to alter genes in an adult. This meant that, effectively, the only tool available was reproductive coercion. Acknowledging that a problem was genetic meant that it was "unsolvable," and that suffering was "inevitable." Because the use of reproductive coercion was so obvious, an elaborate system was set up to suppress information about genetics... but despite this, the study of genetics continued.
Current liberal responses to the use of genetic engineering technology are tainted by the belief that the technology is "science fiction" and may never arrive, and thus someone proposing it may be engaging in discursive maneuvering to "trick" the liberal into supporting human suffering with a fake hypothetical.
We don't actually know how influential liberals will respond when the technology arrives for more than just a handful of monogenic diseases. The idea that they will completely oppose the technology is an assumption, not a fact.
And perhaps more importantly, you never present a solid alternative course of action, and I do not, in fact, have anything better to do.
mitigatedchaos
9mo ago
Personally, I think it's interesting to see how other people respond. He responds to my Tumblr posts in this manner quite regularly.
Dividing up the country doesn't work.
- American leadership aren't willing to enforce borders. They want cheap labor (or votes). After dividing the country, how do you make that stick?
- Smart black Americans don't strongly want to live in a black-only area, but would rather live in the same areas, and work at the same institutions, as their mostly-white (the country being majority white) peers. These are the people you would need to run and staff the institutions that would run a "black" region.
- The "white" region is likely to out-earn the "black" region even if it's just a matter of size and population. Given the above two points, they are likely to begin brain-draining the "black" region of talent, reducing institution quality, reducing production power, reducing earnings, reducing tax revenues.
mitigatedchaos
9mo ago
Biden would have been a moderate if he left in the Trump EO against racial scapegoating. He didn't. His administration have embraced "race conscious" policy, and the only thing preventing it is Republican judges. "We must discriminate against white Americans in every aspect of society" is not a moderate policy.
mitigatedchaos
9mo ago
Flattening out the distribution of realized traits has similar problems to flattening out the distribution of underlying genes, as I'm sure you realize.
Additionally, what the genetics industry actually detects will be what they pay to detect, so there could end up being a reduction in underlying genetic diversity even if there are many variants with the same overall outcome naturally.
The different moral development theories as commonly discussed (Kegan, Kohlberg) seem to have some common ground in an arc of { social morality, formal morality, post-formal morality }, usually around stages numbered 3, 4, and 5, depending on how people are charting it out.
You can think of this as team sports morality ("I'm a Democrat, and our good ingroup believe X") which can turn on a dime (social morality), principled morality that's trying to integrate moral intuitions into a formal system (this would be your conventional philosophies like Utilitarianism), and finally a sort of intuitive recognition that low-dimensionality constructs (like Utilitarianism) are insufficient to contain the whole of morality (for post-formalists).
The transition between each stage involves significant intellectual investment. This motion can be painful because it looks like the old principles falling away into meaninglessness and leaving nihilism.
It's not that Democrats didn't believe in free speech at all. Rather, most political types including most Democrats are social moralists, not formal or post-formal moralists, so they take their orders on their appropriate beliefs from those higher up in their social hierarchy, and then attempt to act on them locally.
2008 American liberalism was a fairly well-hedged ideology overall, so when Democratic leaders pushed for principles like free speech and procedural protections for those accused of crimes and so on, and Democratic social moralists embraced these principles locally, the Democrats as a whole looked a lot smarter than they actually are. The quality of their overall thinking has declined significantly due to the much worse epistemics of Social Justice, and many Democrats are wildly miscalibrated right now.
When I say that we should rebuild philosophical or political liberalism from a perspective of epistemic limits, what I mean is that many liberal principles are similar to prohibitions on economic central planning which is practically problematic due to limits on available information and computational power, but most current liberals don't know this and thus lose interpersonal arguments to "care/harm" types (who use conflict theorist epistemology) because their support for freedom seems "arbitrary."
By developing a philosophical framework which roots liberal principles in limits to information and personal morality, a kind of opposition to "cultural central planning," a new generation of intellectuals could be trained and gain an advantage in the coordination for the defense of liberal principles.
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