quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I have yet to play BG3, so I did not know this.
Typically, in earlier Bioware games, romance was mostly an additional, optional branch near the end of the character arks, so you did not have to replay the games five times because one party member was only into male non-evil dwarven clerics or whatever.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I have not played Black Myth Wukong, but from where I stand, most of the innovation in video games comes out of the Western world. Portal, FTL, Terraria (?), Stardew Valley (?), Slay the Spire, all of whom created (or refined, in case of (?)) a genre, are all Western.
Granted, there is Nintendo and Japanese games in general, which I don't have a lot of exposure to because I play on PCs only and don't like super-hard games.
My exposure to games from mainland China has been rather more limited. I played My Time at Portia, and found it mostly forgettable. Not something worse than a Western studio might produce, but conceptionally derivative. "Let us remake Stardew Valley in 3d, and get rid of the politically precarious 'megacorp comes to small town' storyline".
This could be sampling bias, but it is equally possible that mainland China is not good at fostering small indie game devs from whom most of the innovation comes.
With regards to DEI, my feeling from story-heavy games such as Bioware is that gay dating, like straight dating, is mostly opt-in. If the MC has dialog options to flirt with half of the party members who share their sex, I will not be terribly offended by that, I will just not click on that (depending on the gender of my character, perhaps). Most of the core of wokeness, like the concept of white cis-male privilege is not something a game dev would touch with a ten foot pole. Much safer to translate this to fantasy races such as orcs or elves.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
And currently, the IP seems to be owned by Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro, neither of which are based in California.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
How would Blackwater or Wagner take control of Tesla?
Ah, PMC means 'professional-managerial class' in this context.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Germany had the Baader–Meinhof Gang.
In the grand scheme of things, the RAF was utterly insignificant. They made a lot of headlines with their murders, but they were no closer to taking over the German government than Bin Laden was to establish a caliphate in the US.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I am not convinced that the ability of the tiniest sliver of the population to fuck things up is a net positive.
The way a militia envisioned by the framers would work is that it would unite the bulk of men in a country with similar ideas on how their country should be run. If 99% think that life under British rule is great, and 1% wants to fight for independence, then the 99% would simply arrest the 1% and extradite them to the Brits. Political power grows from the barrel of a gun, so if the guns are equally distributed throughout the population, the majority will be in charge.
If anyone who owns an AR15 gets de-facto veto powers over the federal government, this will not make a country more democratic, but less democratic.
For what it is worth, I agree with @Capital_Room that assassinations are unlikely to change the fundamental character of a political system. If you killed Hitler in 1924, this would not turn the NSDAP or their voters into democrats. But also, if someone had shot Biden in 2020, the US would not have said "well, our democratically elected president is dead, so democracy has failed and we should build a Fuehrerstaat."
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
They left Afghanistan with their tails between their legs, having completely failed their campaign objectives.
Obviously, the nation-building objective failed completely. But during the occupation, at least cities like Kabul were pretty much under US control. Sure, there were IED attacks, but it was not like any insurgents would claim a neighborhood, keep the US out of it and enforce their ideas of Sharia law in it.
Of course, the countryside looked much different, but I would argue that Kabul is a better model of US conditions than overall Afghanistan with regards to accessibility.
Furthermore, many of the insurgents would be ex-US military and could plausibly take things from military bases. Maybe some people within the military are sympathetic to the enemy and are passing intelligence off to the insurgents.
My point is that the US is stable because the US military really buys into the US constitution. A general imprisoning a democratically elected president and declaring himself supreme leader would be considered awfully un-American.
The real advantage of the US is that their media and political power is very strong and they can focus on squashing anything before it becomes a conflict. But if it does come to a conflict then the US government is totally screwed. Very few good outcomes for them. That's why they deployed all those National Guard to Washington after Jan 6th. If they can't squelch it at the beginning, it's all over.
I think this vastly overstates the dangers of J6.
If the SCOTUS had ruled that Trump was the election winner and the rest of Washington had decided to ignore that ruling and certify Biden as the president, that would have been a constitutional crisis, and the question with whom the federal bureaucracy and the military would sided would have been debatable.
With just a lone Trump crying election fraud, the outcome was never in doubt. Even if his followers had managed to take over the Capitol, do you think that that would have changed anything? There is no kill-switch for the US internet controlled from the White House, no easy way to take control of the media narrative.
Even if the powers that be had decided to let the insurgents fester for a month in DC, the outcome would not have been a collapse of the US government. It would have lead to more dead insurgents, and a few DC buildings being worse for wear, but in the end the US military would have prevailed.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I think there is only one point in favor for the ship being sunk intentionally:
If it was true, we could refer to the incident as The Bayesian Conspiracy.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
For that to work, the fact that an assassination happened would have to be common knowledge. I may not be an expert on HPE corporate culture, but I seriously doubt that they start negotiations by letting the other party glimpse some undeniable evidence of murders they have committed.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
The main reason why I have had a pro-2nd Amendment position in the past was because I believed that the 2nd Amendment is a bulwark against government overreach. However, while the US is to me unquestionably more free when it comes to civil rights than, for example, Europe, I am not sure how much this has to do with private gun ownership.
I think that the face of warfare has changed a lot since the framing of the US constitution. In the days of the war of independence, men using small arms, i.e. guns similar to the ones privately owned for hunting or self-defense, made up the bulk of land military capability.
While today military small arms still play an important role in combat, especially in in urban areas, they no longer rule supreme. Artillery, armored vehicles, air and drone strikes are force multipliers for ground operations.
A war where one side has such assets (such as a tyrannic federal government) and the other side (such as freedom-loving Americans) does not have them will likely be very asymmetrical. The US military has proven capable of mostly suppressing insurgents in the Middle East even if they are armed with RPGs, which are crucial to counter armored vehicles.
Compared to patriotic Americans the insurgents in the Middle East had a few key advantages:
- Birth rates above replenishment, where life is cheap
- A religious ideology which emphasizes the importance of violent self-sacrifice
- A causal disregard for the war crimes they are committing when blowing up their civilian countrymen
- Access to RPGs and explosives
Any federal tyrant would first pass a law that punishes the ownership of firearms by summary execution. This would be enough to get most US citizens to hand in their pistols. A few would hide their rifles and eventually rise as an insurgency, but they would be utterly crushed.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
This is a fully general counterargument against anything. Take fraud. There are clear-cut cases: someone paints a rock yellow and sells it as a gold to some fool. There are also transactions which are not fraudulent, and neither party ends up feeling cheated.
And then there is a large grey area of transactions where one party really gets a raw deal and ends up regretting the transaction, but intentional deception by the other party is arguable.
Does this mean that we should throw up our hands in despair and strike fraud from the books as it only rewards people who are smart enough to stop just short of outright fraud? Few people seem to think so. Instead, most are happy to see obvious scammers punished, honest merchants go free and the people in between getting lengthy boring trials.
I will grant you that 'incitement of crimes' is not carving reality perfectly at the joints, because reality is not a bimodal distribution separated neatly by that line. But most of the offenses in criminal law work that way. Fraud. Rape. Murder. DUI. Either we pass arbitrary rules (blood alcohol has to be x for DUI) or we have general rules and leave the rest to the courts (such as manslaughter vs murder II vs murder I).
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Apparently Labor is going to treat Incel ideology similarly to political Islam in the UK (BBC, Guardian).
It will also "identify any gaps in existing policy which need to be addressed to crack down on those pushing harmful and hateful beliefs and violence", she said.
As a freedom of speech apologist, I don't think that this is a good development, but just the response to the latest moral panic and about as justified as the response to 'D&D satanism'.
What should be illegal is incitement to crimes. I am sure that this is already illegal in the UK. "Blow up Parliament for Allah", "Rape some bitches to protest against wokism", "Kill a cop to bring forth the dictatorship of the proletariat" are not protected speech, if anyone posts them on their facebook they would quickly be removed and the poster charged.
Of course, even here, technically enforcing this on more obscure pages is basically impossible without cracking down on the free internet as much as the CCP does (and possibly not even then). Punish what you can find and don't lose too much sleep over some .onion board which you can't police, or infiltrate them if it looks like they are planning concrete crimes in the physical world.
To make broader pieces of ideology illegal, such as "people should live according to Sharia law" or "Capitalism is just a development stage to be overcome" or "Women should have less/more power" would curtail freedom of speech too much for my taste.
I also don't think it will succeed on the object level much. Given that the punishments for simply reading the wrong ideology is hopefully going to be light (CSAM being the only content where merely intentionally viewing it should be a crime), that prohibition will do little to dissuade people from consuming Incel ideology. The main reason why an edgy teenager would not read something widely considered bad is not because the government forbids it, which is to admit 'this is so dangerous that we can't allow people to read it', but that it is generally considered lame in his circles. If Mrs. Cooper bans Incel ideology, that will make Incel ideology less lame, not more lame, because established politicians are invariably lame. (My vocabulary is probably half a century out of date, my point stands.)
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Have you by any chance heard of a website called lesswrong? I think your post might get more engagement there.
The motte started as a spin-off of the politics quarantine area of a spin-off of LW. However, I don't think anyone considers the Neumann-Morgenstern theorem as inappropriately political, so your post should be fine, I would put it up as a personal blogpost, frontpage articles seem to get voted more harshly there. Just don't claim that your post solves AI alignment :)
There is nothing wrong with posting this on the motte (no rule that every post has to be a political hot take), but you are restricting the readership to people who like to engage in policy discussions with an Overton window the size of an aircraft carrier, which excludes a significant fraction of LWers.
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
So what you are asserting is basically
- The Great Replacement is happening.
- That is a good thing.
From that, my priors would normally be that you are a right-wing troll, but given your elaborate post and knowledge of Brecht, I don't think that is the case.
I do not share your disdain of the 'native' poor population. In my view, the value of a human being is not given by how well they thrive in their place in capitalism. While capitalism is by far the most effective economic system, I don't believe it is the voice of a just God, but more like the voice of an alien Elder God, and the best thing we can do is to obey it in places where it can see (like wage levels) and then fix his shortcomings in other places (cash transfers to the poor). To declare "you could not survive on the wages Azatoth has seen fit to assign to you, hence you are worthless" seems utterly bizarre.
It is also unsurprising that the 'native' poor are generally not very happy with the current system which places them on the bottom with few prospects of moving upwards. All too often, they turn to far-right politics. To be fair, the main focal point of anger of anti-immigrant extremists are not academic immigrants, but unskilled workers. While I think their focus on immigrants is misguided and they should focus on demanding more redistribution of wealth instead, I can also see that they are likely affected more by immigrants than the liberal elites who live in the nice part of town and know they will not have to compete for their job with an immigrant from some third world country tomorrow who is happy to work at a fraction of their wage.
So, in practice, I have some disdain for some of the people in every group. The poor who vote Nazi because they think this time, it will fix things. The liberal elites who have adopted woke ideology where compassion is handed out to minorities but refused for the poor with the wrong skin color. Immigrants who come here and think they can raise their daughter according to traditional Islam.
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
While it certainly seems possible that her parents were partly to blame, from the facts I know this is hardly a given.
Teens (and almost-teens) sometimes are capable of making spectacularly bad life choices. Certainly a rough family environment increases the odds, but likely are not strictly required.
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
as long as it is essentially German government policy to gently encourage its citizens to make sacrifices for Ukraine that go above and beyond what they feel they can defend as official policy, it would be counterproductive for them to not take the opportunity to bail him out.
As a German, I generally value Russian hitman being in prison where they belong above rescuing people playing spy for third countries and failing. I mean, if he had been caught during a scheme to kill Putin, then that would be something within German geostrategic interest, and it would be in Germany's interests to bring him back. Doing a bit of sabotage to hamper their war effort feels rather minor by comparison.
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
However, we generally do not blame these Jews for helping to operate Auschwitz, as refusing to perform such work meant certain death.
I would not say things are so clear-cut. Generally, helping running a death camp means being an accessory to murder -- former civilian clerks have been convicted in Germany for that in a few cases (Also, this commonly involves octogenarians in front of a youth criminal court.)
"I had to do it to save my own skin" (which is called duress in English law and entschuldigender Notstand in German law) is not a great excuse for serious crimes.
On the other hand, the culpability of Sonderkommando workers providing unskilled slave labor to the Nazi death machine is minimal, so I would call it excusable.
And then of course some members of the Sonderkommando fully redeemed themselves by blowing up a crematorium.
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
So, the NATO-Russia prisoner swap is a done deal now.
On the one hand, prison swaps are a staple trope of the cold war. Instead of letting professional spies rot in prison, swapping them is a win-win.
On the other hand, this seems not what was happening here. Going through the list, you have:
- Several Western citizens convicted of espionage and the like in Russia. Of course, there is official denial for several of them being spooks, not that this tells you anything.
- Assorted opposition members. These were mostly people staying in Russia and engaging in activities which would risk their arrest. None of them seem of much geostrategic importance.
- Rico Krieger, a German sentenced to death for carrying out sabotage for the Ukrainians in Belarus.
- Vadim Krasikov, who shot a Chechen separatist/terrorist/jihadist in Berlin in broad daylight, and was caught and sentenced for murder.
- The Dultsev[a] couple and Mikhail Mikushin, classic agents
- Vladislav Klyushin and Roman Seleznev, hackers
- Vadim Konoshchenok, circumventing export restrictions on military technology
- Pavel Rubtsov, journalist and suspected spy
Some thoughts on this.
- You generally want to get your real spies back. Trying to get back your people arrested on made-up espionage charges has the long term effect of getting more of your citizens arrested on made-up espionage charges.
- Likewise, if you rescue innocent opposition members lingering in prison, you just increase the incentives for arresting innocent opposition members. In the rare case where an opposition member is of geostrategic importance, it is zero sum: the strategic value of Alexei Navalny would have been his ability to damage Putin. The only way such a deal could happen with rational actors is if both of them disagreed on that value, and kept disagreeing even after learning the value estimate of their enemy. (Or if the other side of the exchange was positive-sum).
With regard to Krieger, there are three possibilities. Either he is innocent, then trying to make concessions to get him back will just mean that more Germans will get arrested to serve as hostages. Or he is guilty and was carrying out sabotage for the Ukranians, in which case the negotiations should be left to the Ukranians. Or he is guilty but was acting on behalf of Germany. In that case, the German agencies have some serious explaining to do, but they might rationally want to get him back.
With regard to Krasikov, it is important to remember that Putin has been enacting murders (and attempts) in Europe with impunity, sometimes with flashy means such as Polonium-210 and neurotoxins. Sometimes an agent gets caught and convicted to life is literally one of the only drawbacks of that policy.
Now, it has been pointed out that his victim was a jihadist of the kind the West likes to eliminate with missile strikes, and it is hypocritical to cry foul on Russian assassinations but not Western ones. Honestly, I don't see it -- there are a few important differences between Ismail Haniyeh, recently killed by an Israeli missile strike, and Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, who was shot by Krasikov. For one thing, the latter was not running a terrorist organization from Berlin, and the chances to get the Germans to extradite him to Russia likely were much higher (back in 2019) than the chances of the Iranians extraditing the Hamas leader to Israel. Also, Germany does not have a history of providing short range missiles to the Baltic countries which these then routinely fire into Russia.
From a Great Game perspective, I think this exchange was a clear win for Putin. Apart from the agents exchanged on either side, he got his hitman back and paid for with a few domestic dissidents nobody cares about, plus the odd Westener taken hostage.
I think that there are two main reasons why he came out ahead on that deal. First, he can deploy much harsher punishments, thereby increasing the pressure for a diplomatic solution. Russian penal colonies are likely a bit harsher than German prison. The other reason is that as an absolute ruler, he has to cater less to public opinion (even though he did get great photo ops out of it). If some Russian citizen is sentenced to death in some shithole country with a terrible human rights record, Putin can just sit this out and tell the media to burry the story. If a German citizen is sentenced to death in Belarus, Scholz can not simply state his objection, but also indicate an unwillingness to make any deals because this would make Germany vulnerable to all sorts of blackmail and thus be bad policy, because the average voter does not understand this.
I am looking forward to other countries like Iran or the Taliban regime trying this. "That bomb-throwing jihadist you have in prison? We really like him back. In exchange, we offer you a bunch of women who were sentenced to death for violating Sharia law, plus the your odd citizen we captured."
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
I have just thought of a beautiful solution to balancing the fights in the face of rare gender configurations.
Boxing would be patently unfair because some humans are twice the size of other humans. Instead of shrugging, or making one category for people above 90kg and one category for people below that, we have some elaborate system of weight classes.
We could just do the same for sex hormones like testosterone, instead of just dividing the population into low-T and high-T.
Now, you might object that this will explode the number of classes, but actually it would be the opposite, because we can just project (weight, T) to a single axis, "advantage", because having higher weight is comeasurable to having higher T using some complicated empirical function.
No more checking what junk someone has in their pants or chromosomes. And if some guy argues that having two extra pairs of testicles transplanted is just part of his gender identity, you can just let him compete, but he will be facing regular-T men twice his weight or whatever.
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
I suspect if we tested male competitors we would find higher than expected incidences of xyy syndromes, which lead to greater height and higher test levels.
Of course, this opens up other possibilities. Other athletes might then convincingly argue that they are suffering from single-Y syndrome, and require additional testosterone to compete on a level playing field.
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
I vaguely remember some paralympics athlete with synthetic legs who wanted to compete against people with regular legs, but I don't know how it turned out.
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
The majority of people across time and space support essentially unlimited punishment
Well, the modal person across space and time was living around 1 CE (give or take a century) as a peasant in some primitive feudal society, and I see no reason why I should take their theory of justice more serious than I would take their cosmology.
Also, I think you are factually wrong. Browsing through ancient legal codes on Wikipedia, I think a key aim of these codes was retributive justice to restore the peace (and presumably prevent feuds between families). For example, from The Code of Hammurabi, per WP:
If an [awīlum] should blind the eye of another [awīlum], they shall blind his eye.
While bloodthirsty, this is also limited scope. It does not call for the death or exile of the perpetrator or his whole family. Presumably, after losing his eye, the perpetrator would live on in the community.
Note that the loss of an eye is no minor matter even today. The contemporary German penal code provides sentences of 1--10 years for blinding an eye (§ 226 StGB) -- or 3+ years if it was intentional.
Also, the idea of individuals as legal entities is a rather modern one not shared by the modal human. See Scott's review of Njal's Saga for a description of a system where families form legal entities.
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
I find your views fascinating in a clinical way. Would you have been okay with his actions if he had intended to marry her, perhaps in a society where child marriage is more common? What if their age difference was larger? Is consent required for marriage, or is that also just a 'modern feminist notion'?
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
So, the Guardian has decided to be offended by a volleyball player, gleefully (and from what I can see, technically correctly (the best kind of correct!)) calling him a child rapist in the headlines.
Apparently he had sex with a twelve-year-old when he was 19 (with no additional elements of coercion) and served a year for it in 2016.
That is one icky age difference, and I think that the prison sentence he served might be an appropriate general deterrent. (Personally, I would prefer having (legally void) consensual sex with an adult (to whom I am attracted, see consent) at age 12 to spending a year in the prison at 19, but ymmv.)
However, I also believe in rehabilitation. I see no reason to report on this any more than if he had served a year for insurance fraud in 2016.
Both of the Guardian articles feel less of a hit piece than some other stuff I have read in the past, apart from the headline. (I wish we had some better phrase to refer to the offense than 'child rape', which includes this but also abducting and violently raping kindergardeners.) Of course, that the elected to report on it at all is the most problematic part of it apart from the headlines -- it was eight years ago, which is longer than most doping bans last, and he did a substantial amount of time for it.
Then the question would be why they would make such claims. I can see two reasons: (1) Signaling value. However, outside of the Less Wrong bubble, the signaling value of believing in p(doom)>0 is negative. Also, a significant fraction of partisans generally tend to believe the fears endorsed for signaling value: if some people are concerned that a Republican/Democrat will lead the US to fascism/communism, I think their fear may be genuine. Granted, they will not act rationally on their fears -- like emigrating to a safer country before the election. (2) Hyping AI. "Our toys are so powerful that our main concern is them taking over the world". This is certainly a thing, but personally, if I wanted to hype up the public about my LLM, I would go for Culture (post-scarcity), not Matrix (extinction).
As an anecdote, I happen to believe that p(doom) is a few percents. Bizarrely, despite me being a self-professed utilitarian, this does not affect my decision on where to be employed. I mean, given that alignment research is not totally saturated with grunt workers, and that there is a chance it could save mankind (perhaps lowering p(doom) by a third), it would be hard to find a more impactful occupation.
I think the reasons for my bizarre behavior (working conventional jobs) are as follows: (1) Status quo bias, social expectations. If half of my friends from uni went into alignment, this would certainly increase the odds for me as well. (2) Lack of a roadmap. Contrast with the LHC. When it was designed in the 1990s as a tool to discover the Higgs and SUSY, there was a plan. Ambitious, but doable, no big essential white spots marked "to be solved by technology yet to be discovered". Becoming a tiny cog in that machine, working on an interface for the cryo controls for the magnets or whatever would have been appealing to me. By contrast, AI alignment feels more like being kids on the beach who thinks there will be an incoming tide, and try to reinforce their sand castles so that they will withstand the water. It is possible that some genius kid will invent cement and solve the tide problem, but it is not something one can plan. Statistically speaking, I would likely end up in a team who tried to make the sand stickier by adding spit or melt the sand into lava over a campfire. The main reason our sand castles would survive would likely be that we are on the shores of a lake and the tide will end up rising only half a centimeter. This might be a psychological flaw of mine, but I prefer to make legible contributions with my work.
Of course, this means that you can say "by revealed preference, this means that quiet_NaN does not believe p(doom) to be in the percent range".
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