ulyssessword
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User ID: 308
ulyssessword
2d ago
Around the time Charlie Kirk was assassinated, there was a post here about actually consuming media before you make judgments about it, lest you be led astray by the memeplex (IIRC, it was a criticism of Joe Rogan that betrayed someone's ignorance, and they admitted they had never listened to a single episode).
The same thing's happening here. "Sanderson writes simple, consumable stories" combined with "'angsty teen gets superpowers' is a common consumable story" to lead you astray. You could make the argument for Mistborn (mostly the first book), Stormlight (only the first book, really), and Elantris. Warbreaker fits worse and could be excluded as an outlier without invalidating the argument. Looking at the rest? It just doesn't work.
ulyssessword
2d ago
It's a good one. I've been rereading every Christmas season.
ulyssessword
2d ago
The market (ﷺ) has determined that these vastly different items have roughly equivalent values. Isn't money wonderful?
ulyssessword
2d ago
I am self employed and work in ecommerce, and thanks to LLMs I can generate thousands of listings' worth of relevant keywords in plain English with great SEO in seconds.
Unfortunately, AI is coming to eat your lunch. Once AI agents get good enough (and people actually start using them), they will simply bypass your store and deny you your cut.
You may currently be providing a valuable service by connecting customers to the products they want to buy where they want to buy them, but AIs will soon be able to also do that at scale, and they demand a much, much smaller fee (often zero).
ulyssessword
3d ago
Good call: It turns out it was the same guy (though I suspect he drove).
ulyssessword
3d ago
Pretty strong, at least for political terror. Think about the selection effects in making it to the "planting a bomb" stage. The absolute dumbest or most impulsive are likely to get filtered out, one way or another.
There's definitely room for serious actors to have a clearer view of the situation, and for them to look beyond the vibes to see the base reality. I'm still worried about stupid people deciding to go for it anyways: A dozen people trying with 10% success rate each is (on its face) worse than one person trying with a 90% success rate.
The flip side is that a huge number of people have personal experience getting away with serious crimes.
The current vibes aren't nearly enough to tip that scale.
It's not one specific tipping point for the whole population, it's a sliding scale that includes more and more people. I worry that it's an S-curve shaped distribution, and the old 1/100M rate (approx 2 people out of the 200M leftest radicalest Americans) of crazies will slip to 1/1M or worse with small changes in the background factors.
(included from downthread)
about as well-founded as OP’s belief in BLM immunity.
They're about a million criminal charges short of losing "immunity", compared to J6. Do you really think 300 federal criminal charges is the correct number that a fully-competent justice system would give?
ulyssessword
4d ago
But isn't the fully based response that, ideally, you actually want shamelessly sexist/racist hiring in humanities jobs that produce cultural products for the US and for the world?
If they can make the case that there's a bona fide occupational qualification to be a certain race/sex/etc., then they can get their exception to civil rights laws, just like anybody else can. Actually, race can almost never be used in that way (the exception is for actors). Also, customer satisfaction doesn't count.
I'd sure like it if they took the fully-based approach. It would have stalled them for a decade or so as they tried to get new legislation passed, and optimistically we could have had a clear public debate about the merits of sex- and race-based discrimination.
ulyssessword
4d ago
How much do you think those vibes influence an honest-to-God terrorist?
Quite a bit. If someone who's disaffected by The SystemTM comes to believe that murder is a good path forward, then they might just do it.
Celebrating political violence and not punishing it is the easiest way to make it more attractive.
They have about as much connection to the actual risk:benefit calculation as tea leaves do.
Broadly correct. What do you think the connection between the actual risk:benefit calculation and the decision to go terrorist is?
ulyssessword
4d ago
I’d say there’s a categorical difference between protests, even ones that turn into riots, and bombings.
I can definitely see that lone-wolf vs. crowd-based violence is different, but they blend together enough to be judged in the same breath.
One particular person chose to throw a Molotov cocktail. The fact that he was within a supportive crowd at the time may have helped him make that choice, but I don't think it caused the desire to appear from nothing. Similarly, the "crowd" couldn't offer concrete support from home, but they could still offer moral support and encouragement.
Were there particular cases you had in mind?
No, explicitly not. This is a 100% psychological/sociological question because that's what drives people to act. If the vibes say you can get away with murder, then people will act like they can get away with murder, and (occasionally) commit murder. The ground truth of conviction rates only matters as far as it changes the perception (and prevents second offenses, I guess). Preemptive arrests are similar.
ulyssessword
4d ago
most multi-unit buildings require a key, and guests have to be buzzed in.
Is that an actual barrier, or a polite fiction? I've definitely seen people follow others into apartment buildings, or enter as people are leaving, or bypass the lock in other ways. I don't think it's a substantial barrier on the scale of an assassination.
ulyssessword
4d ago
No "but" there, that's in line with my point: Violent political attacks on the Left are an attractive option (literally: the option attracts people). If you can do a bit of doublespeak to hide what it is, then that's even better.
ulyssessword
4d ago
The ICE attacks have been groups, and they're awfully close to outnumbering those lone-shooter attacks.
ulyssessword
4d ago
people actually regularly got away with attacks in a way that they don’t today.
How are the "mostly peaceful" protestors doing these days? Perhaps more important: What's the perception of how they are doing these days?
A few early arrests might get people to change their tune, but that would require:
- the first few attacks happening regardless
- the government actually trying to fight against politically-active criminals on the left, and
- them succeeding, and
- that knowledge spreading
It might fizzle out, but I'm not as optimistic that it's simply dead in the water right now.
ulyssessword
5d ago
Seven years is pushing it for "these days", but I'll have to take it given how rare they are overall.
ulyssessword
5d ago
An anti-Jewish/anti-Israel shooter could be from...the right these days.
Examples? Most of the anti-Jewish violence I've heard of is Palestinian-aligned, which is a left wing cause. Oldschool antisemitism (like the Nazis) still exists, but it doesn't have nearly the same prominence as the rest.
ulyssessword
5d ago
The 400 students admitted on merit have no real interest in the other 400 students being admitted on merit.
That's fine, so long as it stays "a few kids on college campuses". Let them vote on a single set of criteria for admission, scholarships, hiring, and promotion, and I bet they'd change their tune real quick.
The same process that puts racially-preferred students will be used again in hiring, and the top merit-based grad will be placed at the same level as the top diversity-based grad (or more likely: The top pure-merit grad will simply lose out to the top combined-merit-and-racial-preference grad). And again when it comes to promotion time: The top performer will be placed at the same level as the top racially-preferred worker.
It might be beneficial to pull the ladder up behind you, but I'd be very, very wary of doing it, even as a maximally-cynical move. The people ahead of me might start getting ideas and pull the ladder up behind them, and I'd be left behind if I can't climb faster than the trend spreads.
ulyssessword
8d ago
It was Richard Spencer of all people who repeated his view on alt-right podcasts that anything that was done without violence can per definition be undone without violence as well...but this argument surely has some legs to stand on
What? That's obvious nonsense that couldn't stand up to any scrutiny. Either it's using the novel expansive definition of "violence" where it just means "bad actions", or else finding counterexamples is trivial.
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I can non-violently scramble an egg. Good luck unscrambling it.
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Libel/slander is not a violent crime, yet the harm is often irreversible and can only be punished and compensated for.
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Robbery and fraud are often not violent, but recovering stolen goods practically requires the use (or at least threat) of violence.
They might be able to stem the tide without needing any enforcement, but that's a long ways from actually reversing it. I think this is obvious enough that the argument would get shut down before it got any real traction.
ulyssessword
10d ago
Immigrants are taking our jobs, except when they're mooching off welfare.
I don't find that hard to square at all. Immigrants are adding to the labor pool more than they're driving job creation, therefore "taking jobs" is accurate on its face. Same with net tax payments vs. receipts (I assume).
As a current resident, the first-order effect is that it's harder to find a job and the government takes more from you while giving you less in return.
Option 2: One immigrant gets a job, brings in half a dozen family members, and receives welfare to pay for their needs.
Option 3: Fraud. There is no "except when", just "while simultaneously"
Option 4: Immigrants drive down wages of the industries they work in, to the point they qualify for welfare while doing a previously-high-paying job. No locals are willing to do the job that cheaply, which just justifies the need for immigration! Instead of one immigrant stealing one job, it's the entire immigrant workforce stealing (and degrading) an entire job sector. (This one's the most dubious IMO).
ulyssessword
11d ago
How cold is your house??
If you don't want to go full parka, then get a blanket (possibly heated) and drink tea. There's also a surprising amount of difference between sitting on a fuzzy couch and sitting on a chair.
It's not like the victim himself was prosecuted for saying a racial slur.
In what way is "you can be justifiably stabbed for saying that" not an infringement of free speech? The only thing I can think of is that it might not be covered by the Second First Amendment of the US.
EDIT: off-by-one error
ulyssessword
13d ago
One underrated aspect of books/articles/etc. is that they can give you something to argue against. Say what you will about the accuracy or the eloquence of its arguments, AI 2027 does make claims, and they are coherent enough to argue against. It may be a low bar, but it's one that so many commentators fail to reach.
ulyssessword
13d ago
ulyssessword
15d ago
ulyssessword
16d ago
In fact, social trust has been declining since the seventies, but has been on the upswing for the past ten years.
A bit of a tangent, but this is something that almost every study/article about anything skips over: Are those differences of opinion correct? Old, rich, educated, white people in safe homogeneous areas trust their neighbors more than young, poor, uneducated, non-white people in unsafe and diverse areas do. To what extent is that because the people they're interacting with are more trustworthy?
The findings are presented as psychological phenomena, but they only put a negligible amount of effort into arguing that the different trust scores are internally-driven instead of rational responses to different situations.
That's kind of hilarious.
psychoanalysis glasses on Why does your book selection process send "angsty teen gets superpowers" Sanderson stories to the top of your to-read list?
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