mitigatedchaos
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User ID: 1767
We just sequenced the genome for the first time around the year 2000. We haven't actually been at this that long.
IMO, it should be given another 30 years before categorizing it with commercial nuclear fusion in terms of 'indefinite' difficulty.
mitigatedchaos
9mo ago
Should note that for the record, I answer all requests from the left to silence the HBDers with "you first; show that you're serious about not supporting 'racial consciousness' and 'corrective' racial discrimination," so realistically I don't expect to take any actions to silence HBD discussion during the next 10 years.
Only people like tracingwoodgrains have moral standing to even make the request, and they're not powerful enough to make it binding at this time.
mitigatedchaos
9mo ago
I believe that's likely to be a future issue and cause a split within the contemporary left coalition as genetic technology improves, resulting in a shift in the makeup of the coalitions.
I have proposed the term "Biosocialism" to cover "the elimination of genetic inequities that are an obstacle to the formation of a global, classless society." Governments have an insurance-like incentive to reduce genetic diversity, and markets are also likely to be a homogenizing force, meaning that this is likely to be a future conflict. I think we might want to get a solid body of theory set up first, so that we're in a better position once various aspects of the genetics industry undergo political polarization.
I'm just going to throw this into the ring because, skimming the comments it hasn't come up yet, but it fundamentally changes the game.
The first commercial gene therapy received FDA approval in 2017. More received approval after, and more are in the works.
In 2000, it took over 10 years and $2B just to sequence a single genome. Now, sequencing costs are under $1,000. Genetic engineering is no longer science fiction and is now a real (but expensive, at around $500,000) technology. All that is necessary is that the industry continues to advance at this pace for another 20-30 years, and the situation with genetics will be fundamentally changed.
Most libs, even most very smart libs, have not heard that genetic engineering is now a real technology, or have not internalized it into their world model. Like many of the contemporary far right, they are stuck in a despair trap based on genetic fatalism. They are convinced that if something is genetic, it cannot be changed except through bloody methods.
Only once genetic engineering becomes as routine as heart surgery, hitting two degrees out on people's social graphs, will they automatically realize that it's a thing and start to understand the implications. However, smart liberals could potentially understand the situation early if someone told them. If so, they might be peeled off the SJ coalition.
If we're going to get genetic engineering tech in 30 years anyway, then heavy moral investments in either "corrective" discrimination or social darwinism don't make sense at this time; at the very least we'd want to see what genetic engineering can't do first before we go all-in on either left-racism or right-racism.
The old WW2 theories of inevitable Malthusian total war were upended by TFR of developed countries falling below replacement around 1973, a gap of about 34 years.
Edit: Gonna be honest here, I'm actually surprised you guys haven't noticed this and started including it in your maneuvers. In 2013, Scott wrote,
How many more centuries do we have in which natural selection is going to be the main force shaping our genome, as opposed to genetic engineering or transfer to nonbiological life? Maybe one, if you’re really pessimistic?
In 2014, he wrote, "Society is Fixed, Biology is Mutable." Yudkowsky and Scott are the leaders of 2012 era Rationalism, and while Yudkowsky didn't have a lot to say about this, it's a pretty straightforward interpretation that Scott's position is that we should hold the line until something like a broad spectrum genetics industry comes online. This would then be sort of the 'default,' unspoken Rationalist position.
I'm embarrassed to admit that though I was aware of CRISPR, I wasn't aware of the 2017 gene therapy until 2023 (I found out around the time Doom Dance was released). Is it just me and (by extension) the people who read mitigatedchaos that noticed? Should we assemble sources and ask Scott to write a follow-up article?
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
TheAgeofShoddy writes on Twitter,
The argument has been that there is something inherently superior, both morally and practically, about migrants- they were more willing to work, more entrepreneurial, willing to make due with less, more in tune with American values, more patriotic (somehow), thus more deserving.
That’s easy to believe when you’re comparing an idealized migrant to the worst assumptions you harbor about your domestic enemies; less so when comparing actual human beings, their needs and strengths and frailties, against all of your most cherished assumptions about yourself.
If the argument now is that migrants may be a net burden but there’s a duty of hospitality, then it is fair to ask how long such an obligation lasts and how far it extends. If the answer is “only so long as it hurts my enemies” then bussing will continue until morale improves.
The fundamental point is that the assumption of innate migrant superiority to current Americans, and therefore of a greater debt which the state owes to migrants relative to those who constitute it and pay for it, must be broken. That is the source of the problem and the fight.
And this is just one front in a larger war over this point. I could re-write this thread and replace “migrant” with “Ukraine” and have to edit very little, because the same principle is at issue: a belief that the government owes moral duties to everyone but its own people.
It is, in one sense, about resources; but core it is about whether democratic government is responsible to the people of the states which elect and empower it, or whether it is responsible both to and for a free-floating set of idealized moralized manias.
That is one of the great questions of our time.
I happen to overall agree - the dominant contemporary US left position on immigration is very much about avoiding having a serious discussion over how much it costs (currently, it is argued that it is free), and what means are acceptable to prevent immigration (currently, almost none) and keep it within some level.
About the only ones moderately serious about this are libertarians, who propose "no welfare" and "upzone everything" as answers, which at least fits the economic considerations, but fail to consider the political economy in a world where social programs fail to converge group outcomes and demagogues are eager to weaponize ethnic tensions.
The current position helps Democrats to keep their coalition together, but it's an obstacle to necessary reforms - which also fits the overexpansion of universities and student debt, Left-NIMBYism, and the general amount of reputation management conducted by Democrats in and outside of the party.
The Democratic Party believe in "race conscious" policy. By your thinking, they have already agreed that racism is good and an acceptable basis for government policy.
These policies were supported with low epistemic standards, and they want to make them race-based content mandatory, so they even agreed that low quality racism is good and acceptable for institutional policy.
In what way do they have any moral standing to complain?
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
The position of the left-wingers is that countries have no moral right to exclude any immigrant that isn't literally part of the Taliban or ISIL, and that all complaints about practical matters such as housing are actually just a cover for ethnic hatred, and that no measure for immigration enforcement is acceptable.
In what way is it unacceptable to make them bear the full burden of their position that housing and other resources are free and materialize the instant an immigrant shows up?
Why should they not be made to take all unauthorised migrants in the entire country? They volunteered.
Sanctuary cities are free riding, and to correct the incentives this should be fixed.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
Not interest rates - the number of people getting the loans in the first place. Should have clarified that.
It has similar political problems, which is why the college loan situation in the US is unlikely to be resolved. Libs have proven willing to accept a higher non-graduation rate and higher debt, but probably won't accept a difference in how often the loans are issued.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
Unlikely to be resolved, because loan rates will differ by ethnic background because college completions differ by ethnic background.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
If HBD is such a dangerous position that it cannot be allowed to be popularized, either because it will be used against the working class, or because it will be abused by the working class - then the broad spectrum suppression requires policing the left flank that attempts to do "corrective" racial discrimination in the opposite direction, so that race can be maintained at a lower standard of relevance for most people.
This is where the Turkheimers and Linds of the world have, in my opinion, really fumbled the ball. I think there are a sprinkling of people who are both anti-HBD and against the "corrective" racial discrimination advanced by the 'social justice' ideology, but they don't seem to have enough power to enforce this view at this time - except, perhaps, for the Supreme Court.
You misread the post as referring only to elite college admissions, when actually it refers to incidents like race-based medical rationing based on a "white" vs "everyone else" system which is scientific racism much less sophisticated than conventional race science, major outlets referring to the existence of asians in engineering departments as a "problem", and explicitly race-based debt relief that had to be shut down by the courts. These are all mainstream, center/left-of-center sources.
This is just what ideas like "white privilege" theory and "race conscious" policy mean.
It is true that Republicans were opposed to Democrats in 2010, but this change, kicking off around 2014, is wildly disproportionate to what the Republican Party actually did.
This view is irrational. You are treating your tribal positions as the default.
The Democrats are a party of irrational, tribalistic, collective, intergenerational ethnic grievance, as seen by use of terms like "BIPOC" that make no sense as a scientific category. Their proposed interventions have no beneficial effects, and they have abandoned the modest evidence for modest success they used to have for their previous policy set in 2010.
This makes me immensely more comfortable with the manipulation of procedural outcomes to prevent the Democratic Party from gaining more power and resources than I was in 2010. Republicans playing hardball with the Supreme Court was apparently necessary for me to keep my human rights, as seen by the recent rolling back of "corrective" racial discrimination programs.
The Democrats could simply have some frank conversations to break their coalitional interest deadlock instead of doing this weird racialist nonsense that has even less backing than conventional scientific racism. They're not obligated to be, somehow, as inconceivable as it was from 2008, literally color supremacist.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
You can do micro vehicles like golf carts that travel only 15-20 mph, which are small and cheap because they need less padding for deceleration. They can even have mounted temperature control systems. Since road capacity is proportional to road width, and golf carts use about half a lane's width, they can have a much higher capacity, and also much smaller parking.
The problem is that a golf cart is a low-security vehicle and the point of US car-dependent suburbs is to exclude judgment-proof defendants by excluding anyone who cannot afford a 20-year mortgage or maintain a $5,000 piece of capital equipment. Any attempt to build a city that excludes judgment-proof by other means will be deemed to have disparate impact, and even if it could be done the mechanisms won't hold intergenerationally.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
A transhumanist setting doesn't mean that bodies are free, or that body swap surgery has zero recovery time.
You can probably come up with something by working with those frictions.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
Nah, it's as someone else once said - Republicans defected on a game show, Democrats burned down the set.
Republican obstructionism is not even in the same ballpark as, "Literally every institution in the country must discriminate by race, based on my racial revenge fantasy, without any evidence that this will work, forever. By the way, I'm going to post in major medical journals about how your race should be 'eliminated'."
In my view, as a response it's completely unhinged. I'm closer to thinking the party should be legally dissolved at this point to force a reboot of their coalition than I would like.
I'm prepared to give the Republicans almost anything they want, because "merit is white supremacist" is incompatible with industrial civilization in a way banning abortion is not.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
Ah, but there are consequences to being unable to make any deals with the opposition. Each day Democrats further retroactively justify Republican obstructionism during the second term of the Obama administration.
"I don't understand why anyone would want a private park," is a fair summary of your position, IMO.
But I think that says much less about "middle-class Americans" than it does about you, your own priorities, and your ability to assess others.
If we're going to be casually racist and speak loosely,
I get what you're talking about, the slice of Chinese pop cultural output that I've seen seems more referential and less sophisticated than what I've seen elsewhere... from Japan. For Korea and Singapore, I think they may have industrialized too quickly, and for China Communism probably damaged the novel culture-generating power that China would have had, and put it below what they could have reached. It probably also damaged the population's behavior, as it seems to have done in Russia.
I still think this vibe would be there without the Communism and if industrialization had occurred more slowly, but there might be a greater perception of comfort and a greater willingness to lean back and experiment.
The success of the Europeans since the 1500s has been a bit psychologically destabilizing for everyone.
Asians are at least on a better footing here in that they're the only ones that can really challenge the Europeans on the footing where they're most impressive - large modern industrial nation-states with sophisticated warfighting systems.
But for others, it's been so upsetting that BENs and WS envision Europeans as some sort of unstoppable psychic warrior race, and I just don't think that's an accurate characterization. If we're being loosely racist, low epistemic standards - they're the galaxy brain race, the Willy Wonka of races, high variation in ideas, and they've been making everyone else put up with their wacky ideas for the last 5 centuries, and sometimes that's been very beneficial, and other times it's been very hazardous. Asians (China especially) may have come up with similar ideas 3 millennia ago, but didn't necessarily apply the same intensity or combine them with industry. (Like, I'm surprised that it's not an Alt-Right meme that "East Asians are the Control Group.")
If people stopped feeling threatened by Europeans for 10 minutes and thought "what are these guys actually like?" they would notice that Europeans are Wonka, notice a bit more of how their ethics distributing stack works (for instance, UMC-W attacks on WWC), relax a bit, and ask themselves how they can use this to build up national wealth. In like 100-200 years, the Europeans may be seen like a Tumblr sexyman.
And to the credit of governments throughout East and Southeast Asia, many of them have shunned the "Revenge of the Third World" model in favor of peacefully building up industrial capital through exports to the United States - even Vietnam, who the United States dumped millions of tons of bombs on in living memory.
(Edit: It should go without saying, but like 90% of "whiteness" theory or "white supremacy" theory content is just the unstoppable psychic warrior race hypothesis. One has to be a bit paranoid to think that "2+2=4" is somehow "white." A lot of this stuff sounds weird because it's superstition.)
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
To have a real "conversation about race" in the United States would mean the US Democratic Party coming clean that they don't know how to close more than a small fraction of the race gaps and have been implicitly lying to their constituents for the better part of 30 years. They will never do this, as it runs counter to their electoral strategy.
When Democrats say the phrase, they mean publicizing and focusing on racial issues without acknowledging this, so they can unilaterally morally lecture Republicans and put all their coalitional baggage on Republicans instead of addressing it.
Right-wingers using the phrase know this and are throwing it back in their face.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
Yeah that's the whole bit there - it's specifically designed to avoid direct reproductive coercion like that. Instead it just feeds people the environment limits early.
The other trick is that because whatever you didn't split with your kids/heirs while you were alive (+ x years for early deaths) gets redistributed, you're basically encouraged to have a kid/heir at some point.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
That depends specifically on the resource type being allocated.
Basically you can store value in whatever resource class is not being allocated in this way. For instance, if every citizen receives an allocation of land or energy rights, you can store value as ownership of factory equipment even if you don't own all the land the factory is on.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
Please see my response here:
https://www.themotte.org/post/229/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/42541?context=8#context
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
Alternative to UBI:
Each person receives a resource allocation block (representing some bundle of ownership of society's stuff and thus resulting rents). When they have a kid, their personal block is split with their kid after a period of time.
When someone dies, their block is distributed evenly to all other living citizens.
This technique was designed to deal with monopolization problems with pseudo-immortality, but it also has the effect of punishing natalism when the overall birthrate exceeds the growth of society's resources. The practical effect is that the impact of natalism hits early, hits hard, and hits those most involved in pushing the world towards Malthusian suffering. On the other hand, if no one else is having children, your kids will get a larger total share of the resources as the others die in boating accidents, landslides, etc. (Children of extreme natalists have to work for a living, but that's the future the natalists would choose for everyone else, so it's just arriving early for them.)
In this scenario, nothing prevents someone from renting their allocation to someone else. That's the capitalist angle - you can live at a higher standard of living by renting additional stuff by providing value to others, but you can't accumulate ownership of whatever the resource allocation block is composed of.
In one sense these critiques have some merit, but in another sense they were broadly deployed in a way that was effectively "men are assumed to be wrong by default and aren't allowed to respond in their own defense," and that applies to every other category they were used on. Subsequently they were also used very hypocritically - stuff like "eliminate whiteness" was normalized in prestigious publications even though saying that about any other race would rightfully be perceived as a threat.
It basically just nosedived straight into tribalism; as a result, I don't think we can treat these discussion norms as legitimate, at least not until they're applied more fairly to humans generally rather than based on identity groups. We need a show of good faith that that's something that the left-wing can realistically achieve, rather than the natural slide downhill of this kind of norm that we would usually expect.
mitigatedchaos
1yr ago
Haha no, I was never ever going to go to Harvard. I'm just sick of being blamed for things that aren't my fault (and if they pass unqualified personnel the blame will still continue!), and I don't want to be operated on by unqualified surgeons.
I didn't complain until "progressives" decided everything in the whole world is my fault and that "merit" was "white supremacist."
Right now gene therapy is mostly focused on severe monogenic disease, either crippling or lethal disease, where the high price and potential risk are worth it.
When it comes to health, such as heart health or lifespan, in general, between { strongly negative, weakly negative, neutral, weakly positive, strongly positive } gene variants (as subjectively defined - I am not making an "objective" ranking), I would expect relatively few { strongly positive } to exist. { weakly negative, weakly positive } will be somewhat difficult for the industry to detect, and if each gene editing operation incurs risk and expenses, are likely not to be targeted until later. { strongly negative } should be easier to detect, has a stronger moral and political case to support it, and is likely to be funded by governments for insurance-like reasons in combination with political reasons.
I think we should expect a lifting of the left tail of the health distribution, rather than much of a boost at the high end. There are natural limiting factors in that the more edits someone makes, the farther away the kid is from being "their" kid, so it's likely that relatively few people would pursue something as radical as DNA synthesis, at least around 2050. Beyond then, it's more difficult to predict. There may also be ideological manias around 2050 that might distort the response.
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