wingdingspringking
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User ID: 1348
wingdingspringking
20d 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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.
wingdingspringking
4mo ago
I would think the answer is be pretty obvious. Language models have struck a death blow to anonymous online forums and now they're bleeding out. Even before LLMs, once people with political agendas or merch to sell realized they could use cheap content sources to manipulate opinions, the writing was on the wall. But now, as the marginal cost of posting content anonymously approaches 0, and the ability to differentiate between humans and bots disappears, this form of media will die.
I think the trend is probably more towards things like private discord servers where at least some degree of familiarity with the other posters is a requirement. Or at the very least, things linked directly to your identity. Maybe there's some space out there for options that require payment in order to participate (substack comments sort of fit this model). But generally, anonymous online posting is on its way out; another strange relic of innovative human communication going the way of the carrier pigeon and the messages in a bottle. Still, 30 years was a pretty good run. I'm glad I got to be in on it.
wingdingspringking
5mo ago
I'm pretty sure it's just the standard "never show weakness" logic. People who take this position are highly concerned with optics. It's hard to assert that you have a morally superior position when flaws can be found in the building blocks. Strategically it's better to gloss over as many as possible, redirect when exposed, and then scrub them from the records when the spotlight is elsewhere.
wingdingspringking
5mo ago
The scary thing is it's not limited to individuals, or even just current events. You'd think history would be a little more dispassionate, but unfortunately that isn't the case.
Here's the example that really made me realize the extent of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache
While there are sections in there about the Apache wars with the US, there is absolutely nothing about the fact that they were almost eradicated by the Comanche. In fact, it barely even mentions the Comanche at all. That would be like discussing small pox and barely even mentioning the vaccine while going into great depth on its decline during the 20th century.
wingdingspringking
5mo ago
I mean, I agree on a bunch of the points about why the establishment has lost credibility in terms of protecting domestic manufacturing interests. In my view, letting China into the WTO was the single largest political blunder of the last 50 years. But that doesn't change the fact that mathematically an overall effective tariff rate should be relatively straight forward to calculate. TOTAL_TARIFFS_PAID / TOTAL_VALUE_OF_GOODS doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room. I suppose you could always add other taxes onto the goods once they've entered the market and not charge them at the border, but that wouldn't exactly be subtle or easy to cover up.
wingdingspringking
5mo ago
This seems to be the standard justification for tariffs that I hear. I don't think it's realistic, but then again, I have only a cursory understanding of the subject.
From the numbers I've seen, most western countries have a some small niche industries that they protect, and so they have high tariffs on those. But those niche industries account for a very small percentage of overall trade. Take, for example, the US and Canada (before the current Trump tariffs). Canada puts huge tariffs on US dairy. And the US puts huge tariffs on softwood lumber. But those are only a tiny percentage of total trade. So while there were double digit tariffs in those specific categories, the overall effective tariff rate was very low (1-2%) flowing both ways.
Is that not the case?
wingdingspringking
5mo ago
I tend to agree unfortunately. The GOP's single largest electoral asset before all of this was being seen as better stewards of the economy. A large number of people voted for them purely based on that. If that image is utterly destroyed, we might see an electoral swing on a scale we haven't in recent memory.
Polling hasn't moved that way yet. But this also hasn't hit the working class yet. This is going to get messy.
wingdingspringking
5mo ago
Okay, fair enough. You're engaging with the specific case, when the point I'm driving at is the generalization; that drastic changes to the rules by which the economy functions can have large and sometimes very negative consequences. If you want to apply that generalization to the case of the great depression, then yes, monetary policy that resulted in an insufficient money supply was a key factor. So was a large asset bubble. We could just as easily look at the case of the Spanish Price Revolution to see what happens when the government drastically increases the money supply without understanding what the effects of that will be.
None of that detracts from the fact that ideological economic changes, imposed literally overnight, are politically risky if the ideology doesn't match reality.
wingdingspringking
5mo ago
It was a dumb idea to let China into the western trade networks in the late 90s. There I agree with you. But that doesn't change the fact that reversing course on a ship this size is not something that can be accomplished overnight. Trying to do so will simply sink the ship.
I think it's easy to loose site of how much we still have to loose. The poor people in Youngstown or Detroit are still better off than their counterparts from 100 years ago. At least nobody is starving on the street in the present day US.
wingdingspringking
5mo ago
You are essentially saying that mass disruptions to the economy come only from deflation. In my view, that's a bit of a presumptuous statement to make about a system so large that no human being can really conceive of it in its entirety.
I'm certainly not arguing that I know that tariffs of this scale will collapse the system. What I am arguing is that making rapid changes of that scale has the capacity to cause large, unforeseen consequences. And that such consequences may not be easily reversible. From a political calculus standpoint, it's a very dangerous move.
wingdingspringking
5mo ago
Agreed. On economics I'm quite conservative in the traditional, Chesterton's fence sense of the word. Re-routing the irrigation ditches with a nuclear explosion and still expecting the crops to get watered is a very risky bet.
wingdingspringking
5mo ago
The 30% vote against whoever is in power. 1929 US was fresh off of a decade of republican rule. So they gave it to the dems. The Wiemar republic was a pretty left wing entity. So the 30% swung it to the right.
It's really unlikely that a right wing party crashing the economy would result in people moving more to the right. If anything, it would kill the biggest electoral advantage that the republicans have traditionally enjoyed, benefit of the doubt on the economy.
wingdingspringking
5mo ago
If we see a crash on par with the great depression, the 30% of people that normally tune out politics are going to vote. Last time that happened, we got FDR and then leftist politics for 2 generations. This time it will be worse, since social media, if captured, allows for much tighter control over the narrative. Is that really worth the risk?
wingdingspringking
5mo ago
The social justice explosion from roughly 2012-2023.
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.
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