wingdingspringking
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User ID: 1348
wingdingspringking
26d ago
It's not a disinformation campaign. It is literal Darwinism. Societies and cultures that don't promote having kids cease to exist.
I tend to think the whole "drop in birth rate" thing is overblown. It will correct itself in a generation or two, after people who lose the drive to reproduce in modern, information rich environments are removed from the gene pool. This is the strongest selective pressure our species has come under in quite a while. And if all that comes out on the other side is a bunch of Mormons, Muslims, and Haredi Jews, so be it. Natural selection has spoken.
Even in the case of Ireland, the violence just swayed opinion. It didn't actually kill off or pacify enough of the losing demographic to affect the outcome; that requires the "old" prehistoric type of violence. Iran's crackdown has been more in that vein than anything we do. Newer violence is mostly just a PR move.
The civil rights movement is interesting in that it was the starting point for this whole conflict. But I don't know if it tells us too much about how it ends. At the risk of dramatizing it a bit, the historical arc as I see it looks like this:
You start with a system that is pretty blatantly unfair (encoded in law, rigidly enforced etc) to the various groups that make up the current woke pantheon. You also have a rich, quickly advancing society (US circa 1960s) that has every reason to be optimistic about the future. In an environment like that, it's easy to convince the majority of people that it's only fair to make life better for those on the bottom rungs. People are generous when their bellies are full.
Then the organizations and institutions that were built around helping those groups end up winning. They achieve their goals. But careers have been built around this. Huge fund raising networks exist. Do you just set everything down and walk away when you're done? Of course not. You find new problems. Maybe not as big, but problems none the less.
Go through a few dozen iterations of that, and you end up where we are now. We aren't nearly as prosperous and optimistic anymore. These movements have taken on the characteristics of religions, complete with crazed zealots running around attacking non believers. In a situation like that, you suddenly get backlash. Small and isolated at first, and then suddenly huge. The wokes/SJWs try to fight back, expecting the same up-swell of support they got back in the 60s, but it's not there. Nobody under the age of 70 even remembers segregation. But we all remember not being able to get some perk because we don't tick the right intersectional boxes.
Religious zealots don't usually put down their scourges willingly. And religious beliefs are pretty hard to change if they've become the bedrock of one's morality. But the bulk of society is no longer willing to play along with the SJW fantasies about living in the 60s. Normally, the birth of a new religion has gone hand in hand with a violent struggle against whatever existing institutions it encountered. But if that's not able to happen....then what will?
wingdingspringking
1mo ago
I agree with most of this, but I think one of the primary failure modes of the "those guys are evil and want to kill me" line of reasoning is that, within a single modern day society, those other guys can't kill you. Nor can you kill them. At least not at any meaningful scale. This is where the lizard brain short circuits.
In prehistoric times (the times our brains are optimized for), once your group had decided another group was dangerous, you tried to kill them. And they tried to kill you. One side succeeded and then moved on. The loser was either dead, enslaved, or driven far away. Even a couple hundred years ago, intra-society tribal feuds could result in things like civil wars and pogroms. But in modern western societies, there is no such mechanism. Look at how bent out of shape society got after 2 people were killed by sectarian violence.
So we have two sides that have gone from grudging cooperation to full on "we need to fight, this is an enemy" mode. But no matter how hard you fight, the enemy is still there. You can pass laws and change policies, but the enemy is just sitting there watching, getting angrier and angrier. I don't know what a modern resolution to this type of schism looks like.
wingdingspringking
1mo ago
While possible, this is still sort of science fiction. The bigger risk to gold is that, as gold gets more expensive, deeper and deeper extraction becomes economical. This pushes innovation in the technologies surrounding deep mineral extraction. If it turns out that there are much larger deposits down there, the market suddenly looks very different.
wingdingspringking
1mo ago
In the short/mid term I agree. Precious metals have a pretty good track record of weathering financial crises, and given the lack of fiscal responsibility being exhibited right now, at some point a huge amount of capital is going to be looking for a new safe haven.
The tricky part though is finding new places to park assets long term, the segment of the market that used to be dominated by 30 year treasuries. Each alternative store of value has its corresponding black swan events that could wipe you out:
Gold/Silver -The discovery of a large new lode made available through new tech.
Bitcoin/crypto -Large scale internet outage and/or network fragmentation (ie the US internet is no longer able to talk to Asia for some period of time). Anything that disrupts the continuity of the blockchain. I think this is a much larger threat to crypto than than shor's algorithm.
Index funds -Because they cover the Western economy as a whole, they are highly susceptible to geopolitical risk. A major shift in the geopolitical centers of power would likely take its toll on these markets.
I guess maybe long term a basket of commodities with some real estate sprinkled in might work, but that's not nearly as fungible and lacks a consistent track record. It'll be interesting to see what people do.
wingdingspringking
1mo ago
I'm genuinely curious, in what way do you think JD Vance would be a step down? I'm assuming you are somewhat inclined towards preserving elements of the status quo given your posts. Do you believe Vance would be more destructive? More impulsive? What is the main concern?
I ask because I've seen this sort of addendum tacked on to a lot of statements about Trump across the internet, but I've yet to hear what specifically is so much worse about Vance.
wingdingspringking
2mo ago
A lot of that is a function of how the representatives are chosen though. We have A) an extremely polarizing primary process, and B) a system that allows the executive and agencies to function in a weird sort of limbo while the legislature does nothing. Those are both problems caused by perverse incentives, that could easily be fixed by a better structure.
wingdingspringking
2mo ago
He starts out talking about the full sovereignty enjoyed by British parliament, but then goes down a rabbit hole with some pie-in-the-sky, untested, cyber-punk app idea. Why not go with what you know works (and has worked for 700+ years). Call a constitutional convention with the express stated purpose of switching the US over to a parliamentary system. Everyone hates the current system. I bet you could get support from a lot of unexpected corners. You can call the prime minister the president if you want, for the sake of the hard core traditionalists. But otherwise, it would be a clean sweep.
For the record, I prefer stability over all of this. But if you are going to do something, copy an existing model and implement it well. That's how China is eating our lunch. We might as well eat someone else's.
wingdingspringking
2mo ago
While there is a population difference, I think the primary reason China is so much more capable than the west isn't cultural but economic. They have a much more potent economic model than the (more or less) free market capitalism that exists in the west. They limit the places their citizens can store money to largely just banks and real estate. They then hyper focus that pooled capital towards very unprofitable ventures in order to super charge industries. While this model is not particularly pleasant for the individuals involved, it is highly competitive on the national scale. The west, with its focus on individual rights, just can't compete.
I think a lot of the cope on this comes from people that have internalized the whole "capitalism is optimized asset allocation" thing. I don't see why that's necessarily the case. Clearly it outperforms feudalism or true centralized command communism, but why should we believe that it's the best possible economic system with so few data points. It seems to me like the Chinese have threaded the needle between communism and capitalism and created something better. Is it sustainable? Who knows. Centralizing economic authority can lead to some catastrophic failures when that authority becomes incompetent. But for now, being able to focus a country's pooled resources into any industry looks a hell of a lot better than the western economic model, where our best and brightest are incentivized to spend their prime years shuffling assets from one pile to another to make a buck.
wingdingspringking
3mo ago
How many societies allowed open condemnation of the gods by philosophers? Ancient Greece, maybe. But even there, if you pushed too far, you ended up drinking hemlock.
wingdingspringking
3mo ago
I guess it's not all that surprising though if you've never encountered a religion like that. It's the quintessential black swan fallacy. If every religion you've seen has a deity, you'll assume that it's an essential feature, not a useful adaptation.
wingdingspringking
3mo ago
Why do progressives still want to fight dead battlegrounds? For the same reason that Jehovah's witnesses keep knocking on doors. It's the nature of religion. Keep doing what is "good", so that you yourself remain "good".
A lot of people seem to think of a religion as something that addresses big spiritual questions like death and meaning. But I would argue that the defining feature of a religion is a monopoly on morality, just as the defining feature of a government is a monopoly on violence. And because of this societal confusion about what constitutes a religion, the "woke" religion has been able to fly under the radar without calling itself what it actually is.
When you look at it this way, it makes a lot more sense. When you believe in the absolute morality of what you are doing, the odds don't matter. The pay doesn't matter. Nothing matters besides doing what is "right". It doesn't take too many of this kind of true believer to tip the scales on an issue, since they are willing to push the cause forward at great personal cost (friendships, jobs, family, etc).
I think historically this is probably why most states were unwilling to tolerate other religious systems anywhere near the levers of power. The monopolies of violence and morality are most stable when they walk hand in hand. But here we are, buried under centuries of enlightenment thinking, unable to see something so obvious that a peasant from the middle ages would have likely scoffed in disbelief before shuffling away to thresh more wheat. So why do progressives still want to fight dead battlegrounds? Short answer - John Fucking Locke.
wingdingspringking
6mo ago
The Coordinating Mechanism for Woke
From the early 2010s until roughly 2023, the prevalence of woke coded speech on the internet was constantly on the rise. There has been endless debate over the origins of it, but everyone here is likely familiar with the terms, tone, and intent of such speech. And then, suddenly, in the last 2 years, it basically vanished. Sure there are small, insular corners of the media landscape that still openly discuss such ideas. But on almost all mainstream sites, media outlets, shows, newsletters, etc, the prevalence of woke coded language has decreased by an order of magnitude.
The political reasons for this should be obvious at this point, but what I find puzzling is the speed at which this marked drop was coordinated across all types of media. I'm not enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe there is any shadowy cabal actually orchestrating this. But in the absence of any other coordination mechanism, I have a hard time understanding what has caused this. You would expect a movement that built momentum and followers steadily over a number of years to take an equal amount of time to slow down. Indeed, most other social trends follow that pattern. But in this case, the halt was sudden and ubiquitous. So, as the title implies, my question is really about how this has happened.
If I were to speculate, I'd say that any mass coordination across disparate elements of society, without any authority dictating it, has all the hallmarks of the invisible hand. And if it were only news institutions and media outlets I would give more credence to this theory. But just looking at social media postings, there has been a huge drop in people using this type of language. Attending free activities and events, this rhetoric is less prevalent. And since I have a very hard time accepting that the beliefs themselves are gone, I can't come up with a convincing explanation.
wingdingspringking
6mo ago
I think a lot of people (myself included) are mostly worried about Trump's economic policies. The ballooning deficit with no real attempt at austerity is certainly a major issue, but that has been discussed in other comments, so I'll focus on two other ones; tariffs and monetary policy.
The tariffs in and of themselves are not a major issue, but the uncertainty around how they are implemented (and the speed at which they are altered) is. One of the primary things that has made the US a major world player economically is stability. When things become unstable, businesses (and people in general) circle the wagons, stop investing in riskier things, and stop spending. While this all might seem very abstract, there are a lot of concrete examples on this one. The most salient for the average person is the fact that you can no longer reliably mail things to the US. But in the long term, disruption of industrial supply lines is likely to cause a much larger problem, especially in terms of inflation.
The other piece of this is monetary policy, and Trump's attempt to directly control the federal reserve. The reason for the federal reserve's independence is that lowering interest rates is very useful for short term political gain, a fact that Trump seems quite aware of. But in the medium term, the combination of increasing the money supply, putting supply constraints on the whole economy via import duties, and heavy deficit spending is likely to cause large amounts of inflation. And that, more than anything else, is what worries me about the current administration.
wingdingspringking
6mo ago
Long term I agree. The problem is, there is a high correlation right now between prices in the crypto space. A sudden plunge anywhere could cause a plunge everywhere. In theory BTC could bounce right back as the others collapse, but that isn't a forgone conclusion. It could just as easily take a major hit.
wingdingspringking
6mo ago
I actually somewhat like bitcoin in the long term as a store of value. It is the first mover in terms of creating artificial scarcity, and has surprisingly few weaknesses in terms of preserving that scarcity. Contrast that to something like gold where changes in mining output or industrial demand can impose external price pressures outside of the supply/demand for a safe haven.
That being said, I think the rest of crypto is arguably the largest bubble in human history. I don't see any real value provided by the chains that try to act as both a platform and as a currency. And i expect that at some point those will all come crashing down. And when this happens, I expect that bitcoin will take a major hit. I doubt it will be a lethal blow, but I could easily see a >50% loss happening. That's a lot of risk if you are trying to preserve value.
wingdingspringking
7mo ago
This touches on something I've been wondering about for a while: Do all of these qualitative updates to LLMs actually translate to new use cases? In my case, the only two updates that have had any significant impact on my LLM use were the jump from ChatGpt3.5 to 4, and the increase of the context window from small to essentially limitless (yes it still has limits, but in day to day use I rarely hit them). Both of those happened in 2023. Since then, LLM tooling has become vastly better. But I struggle to think of anything that I can do now with an LLM that I couldn't have done in 2023 based purely on the quality of the LLM output.
wingdingspringking
8mo ago
This hits on an idea I was thinking about recently. In order to genuinely enjoy any sort of fiction, you have to be able to suspend disbelief. Almost all fiction has fantastic, or at least slightly unbelievable elements. While sometimes these are the crux of the work, other times they serve more mundane functions like the simplification of an overly complex plot.
What I've been noticing as I get older is that I'm able to do this less and less. When you consume new media while young, you are able to gloss over inconsistencies with ease. As you age, these become more jarring, eventually making consumption of new plot lines kind of difficult.
In light of this, I find myself wondering if a lot of new shows are as bad as they seem, or if I'm simply unable to overlook their flaws (or inadvertently comparing them to the best-in-genera alternatives)
wingdingspringking
8mo ago
One interesting implication of all of this (that you hinted when discussing future generations) is that Darwinism is coming back in a big way. Short of some world shattering event occurring (like an AI singularity or nuclear war), it looks like the world will be inherited by two groups.
The first are those who have such a strong drive to reproduce that they overcome all the perverse incentives and still have large numbers of kids. Presumably, if these incentives exist for multiple generations, after a century or two we will have selected for people who will reproduce in spite of pressure to the contrary.
The second are groups that impose strict social mores in such a way that they prevent such incentives from infiltrating their communities. Hasidic Jews and Mennonites still have very large numbers of children, and show no signs of slowing down. These groups have also existed for centuries during periods of massive social change, which lends credence to the idea that they will continue to do so.
All of this brings me to what I consider to be the most lamentable point of this whole discussion; we will never get to see what happens. It sort of feels like watching a movie and leaving right at the climax. Massive technological, social, cultural, and environmental trends all peaking at the same time, and then no resolution. Such a shame.
wingdingspringking
9mo ago
I'm a little confused about what you are replying to. I certainly never said that online dating isn't prevalent. Nor did I make any generalized statements about what happens offline. My point was simply that spending some time and effort searching for alternative dating pools is probably more worthwhile than spending that same time and effort on an easily accessible dating pool with poor outcomes.
Let's look at specifics. A club is a poor substitute for online dating, because you get very little time to interact with someone. So it requires people to make the same snap judgements that they do online. A better alternative is something that is going to put you in repeated contact with the same people over and over. That is traditionally how relationships have formed throughout most of human history. You also probably want to choose something where the odds are your favor.
Assuming you are a guy, there are any number of classes, part time jobs, volunteer work, or group activities in female dominated areas that would probably accomplish this. And if the first one doesn't work, you can easily keep trying others until you find one that does. It requires some effort and strategy. But if the alternative is repeated disappointment with dating apps, it certainly seems like the better option.
wingdingspringking
9mo ago
In abstract/general sense, I agree. If your options are to accept a bad lot or to gamble with long odds, it's probably better to gamble. When it comes to dating though, I have a hard time imaging a situation (or at least a common situation), where apps are literally the only option. Maybe if you are in a mining camp?
wingdingspringking
9mo ago
The whole obsession with fairness is just an outgrowth of humans' acute awareness of social hierarchies. People lower on the totem pole hate and envy those above them and dream of moving up. Those near the top live in constant dread of losing their spot. Nobody is happy.
On top of that, the optimal strategy for a happy individual is not aligned with the optimal strategy for a society. For an individual, the best strategy is to climb high enough to meet all of your needs, and then stop worrying about the hierarchy. For a society, the best strategy is to convince everyone to be satisfied with their current place in the hierarchy and to not rock the boat. It's no coincidence that basically every major religion pushes this message.
In the end, the messaging from society usually wins. So most people "accept" their place, but not in some zen sense of the word. They use defense mechanisms that hurt their chances of improving their situation, but numb some of the pain. A win-win for society, but not great for those holding it up.
wingdingspringking
9mo ago
My initial thought was that it was some form of sexually antagonistic selection. Self-pity in women isn't nearly as detrimental to courtship as it is in men. And it does work really well as a defense mechanism. Given that it isn't terribly important for lower tier males to reproduce from an evolutionary standpoint, having such a defense mechanism that helps women survive at the expense of some men is probably a good tradeoff.
wingdingspringking
9mo ago
This hits on two points that I think apply to a lot of online discourse around dating.. The first is that in any competitive environment, playing in a game where the odds are not in your favor is dumb. Anyone with a tiny bit of quantitative background will tell you that playing slots at a casino is a bad idea. In fact, playing anything in a casino unless you have an edge is probably a bad idea. But those same people (assuming they are guys) will get on dating apps and then complain. Dating is a competitive endeavor. Those apps are massively stacked against you unless you are very attractive. So the logical solution is: don't play. Go find other options where you have a competitive edge. Is it fair? No. Why should it be. Is it harder this way? Of course, if it was easy, the app people would be doing it.
Which brings me to my second point. Whenever these conversations come up online, there's always a strong undercurrent of self-pity from a bunch of the people talking. And self-pity is death. I wonder sometimes what evolutionary advantage self pity-ever carried. In any case, it underpins a huge amount of the terminally online world, and is dragging society down with it. But for a guy trying to date, it truly is the mark of the beast. Women will not go near a guy who stinks of self-pity. And the isolation it breeds just serves to reinforce it. It's a painful cycle to break out of, but unless you're ready to curl up and die, there really is no other choice.
I had an interesting thought about this (the capacity of AI to replace humans) today while using Claude. It is very good at suggesting possibilities. Telling me how I can do something. But if I argue long enough, it will almost always concede the point. I'm sure that I'm not always right in these arguments.
What it lacks is not judgement so much as convictions. Knowing which points are flexible and which are not. And this is important because when an agent is working on something, it has to make a lot of small decisions with compounding effects. Recently the quality of these decisions while made in a vacuum has been getting much better. But the second they start getting push-back from the real world, I have a strong suspicion that the agents are just going to roll over.
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