magic9mushroom

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 19m ago · Edited 16m ago

That seems greatly distinct from what he said; "Trump is running on vibes and obsessions rather than means-ends reasoning" is a theory of mind, and an analogous statement is true of many people (at least in a lot of situations) regardless of whether it's true or not in this particular case - this is the simulacrum levels 3 and especially 4.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 21m ago

Until Trump climbed down today the slide was showing no signs of stopping whatsoever. We're barely more than a week removed from the original announcement.

I will say, having my net worth in term deposits (because I'm a pessimist, if largely for other reasons) has served me well this week.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 1hr ago

The cockpit security doors are less obviously insane than most of the anti-Twin-Towers measures. There's a drawback in the whole "pilot suicide" issue, but pilot suicides are a lot less bad than ramming attacks and are in some ways easier to stop.

Yes, the Flight 93 scenario is the norm now which makes it far harder to pull off a lookalike, but some defence in depth isn't crazy.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 20hr ago

Far bigger economy and military (aside from nuke count, which is rapidly rising) = far more credible threat to depose the US as hegemon.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 1d ago

By landmass, Canada is the second-largest country in the world, after Russia.

No, it's not. The USA and China have more land area than Canada (although not by much).

It comes out second on total-area calculations because of its very large territorial waters due to its many lakes and vast coastlines.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 4d ago

I figured I'd better ask because, well, it's not like Trump can't order a nuclear test, and it probably wouldn't even be the most shocking thing he's done this year (though ordering a nuke used in anger would). Hell, I'm not even sure it'd be a bad idea, if only to check that they still work.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 4d ago

Not always. Yudkowsky's example of "if the world will end in ten years, and you know this, this won't help you make money" holds water. Things shaped similarly to this also tend to be hard to make money from, due to difficulty collecting winnings and/or spending them; being a nuclear doomer might mean that I'm unusually well-equipped to survive a nuclear war, but I haven't figured out a way to actively profit from it.

There's also the famous (or perhaps infamous) saying, "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". Frauds tend to go up and up and up before they come down; knowing they're fraudulent without knowing the exact timing of said fraud's discovery means you might not be able to hold out against the margin calls.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 5d ago

I'd split hairs to some degree regarding manufacturing vs. marketing, but I'll admit to a flub there.

(I'm not at 100%; I've been doing a circadian rhythm loop-de-loop the past, uh, two? three? days. I think I've been up for nearly 24 hours, though I'm barely even sure of that at this point. Might try and sort this out after some sleep; I don't think attempting it now would be productive.)

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 5d ago

If this is true for the two non-governmentally related jobs of the three, why do they pay well?

Well, "negative-sum" doesn't mean an activity doesn't pay well, or even that it doesn't provide value to an organisation paying you in excess of what they're paying you - it just means that it hurts others by more.

To give an obvious example, fraud is highly profitable, but it's negative-sum; it hurts the fraud victims (and those who have to put in effort to not become victims) more than it benefits the fraudster. A less-obvious example is modern advertising - there is certainly a positive-sum component to advertising (specifically, creating awareness of deals) but there's also a negative-sum component (specifically, manipulating the advertisee into taking deals that do not benefit him) and as marketing psychology has improved that negative-sum component has grown very large (if I were Czar, I'd at least consider requiring advertisements to be as unsophisticated as 1930s ones; 1930s advertising, when it wasn't just straight-up fraud, was clearly overall positive-sum). Zvi makes a case that online gambling is negative-sum, despite it being profitable. There's a case that TikTok and other social media are negative-sum, and while certainly some of these are unprofitable others aren't, which is related to why I think an outright "smartphones were a mistake" is a colourable position (certainly I've specifically avoided getting one for myself).

There are a bunch of profitable negative-sum activities around. Obviously, a lot of them wind up illegal, because this is like the 101-level case for where governmental intervention can benefit everyone, but a lot are legal at any given time due to either novelty or potential collateral damage/political costs of attempting to stamp them out.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 5d ago

If you're a Luddite; I see no other way to object to designing iPhones.

With respect to smartphones: yes, I'm a Luddite. Zvi's made the case at length regarding the depression epidemic. Also, since I know you don't like SJ, and it's pretty obvious that smartphones helped it nucleate by bringing normies and, well, women onto the Internet, the only hole I can currently see through which you can maybe wriggle out of damning them for that would be to claim that (smartphones helped the alt-right more than they helped SJ ∩ the rise in culture war temperature from amplifying both sides is outweighed by the differential).

The literal iPhone i.e. Apple smartphone also has a business model heavily based around fashion cycles. Fashion cycles are waste, pure relative-at-expense-of-absolute.

Day trading is volunteering to be a cog in the machine which discovers prices, which is useful (most people who try end up as lubricant instead of cog, which is why you probably shouldn't do it).

I'm generally of the view that this beach can tolerate wooden shacks but that building multi-storey brick buildings on it is asking for trouble.

The most that can be achieved building a society on those is being a rich city-state like Dubai or Singapore, not a great power.

To be clear, "building a society on those" =/= "having those in existence". The USA, USSR and PRC all built their power on manufacturing, which is real positive-sum activity.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 5d ago

Trump just stood up and said "Hey everybody, watch this!" and dropped a nuke.

Wait, are you being literal or metaphorical here? If literal, could I please have some further reading?

-5

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 5d ago · Edited 5d ago

Let us crash the economy so that the PMC will have to work in the fields instead of designing iPhones or being a DEI compliance officer or living from day trading.

In all seriousness, all of these things have extremely dubious and probably negative value to society. Two of these are very directly negative-sum extractive behaviour with sketchy arguments for redeeming value, and the third arguably is plus has staggeringly-negative externalities including the prevalence of one of the other two.

The maze has you, Neo; doing these is not prosocial or something that should be aspired to. The most that can be achieved building a society on those is being a rich city-state like Dubai or Singapore, not a great power.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 5d ago

Strategy games peaked very early; Achron is about the only RTS I know since the new millennium that can truly be called groundbreaking, and the new millennium's about when UIs stopped being janky as well (though it took a few more years for every franchise to get an entry that was jank-free). I haven't played as many 4Xes (in particular I haven't played any Paradox games), but AIUI SMAC still has little competition for the Civ spot despite being pre-millennium.

On the other hand, VNs peaked quite late, I'd say early 2010s. Most other genres were somewhere in between.

A key point here is that games only require a certain amount of processing to be good, so House's law becomes irrelevant after a point. Yes, their GPU needs have continued to build, making games bigger and more expensive, but this was not really necessary or useful, just something that AAA developers continued doing in Molochian competition for the "ooh, shiny" demographic (even that eventually started to go indie, though much later).

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Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 6d ago

Why Batman Can’t Kill People is a very, very good essay that I recommend

There is a way to fix this, actually, and ironically they've kinda implemented the fix but without removing the stupid patch (at least not fully).

The way to fix it is to not have endless continuity. Either go make a new property (stories are supposed to end, y'know...), or keep reanimating this one without continuity. That lets you kill the bad guys and resolve the problem. Of course, while e.g. the Nolan films did actually kill off most of the villains (Ra's/Two-Face/Maroni/Bane/Talia all die; Joker presumably came down with a bad case of "resisting arrest"; Falcone's a vegetable, Catwoman lives and I think Scarecrow's left hanging), they still kept unexplained No-Kill Batman.

Young sees the problem, but he bizarrely says "get over it" rather than "50-year continuities suck actually, don't do them". So I don't actually think it's a "very good essay".

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 7d ago

I will say, making it a classmate and not a teacher or politician getting murdered was a clever move. Either of the latter two would risk a Torment Nexus/"this, but unironically" response.

(Disclaimer: I happen to agree with the opinion I'm imputing to the writers - that students murdering teachers and politicians en-masse would, in fact, be bad.)

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 7d ago

This is the best review I've seen of Adolescence.

"reign in" got past The Spectator's proofreaders? I'd say they cut out the humans too soon, but I'm pretty sure even current AIs would spot that one.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 8d ago

Jury nullification is one-way only. If a jury convicts and the judge thinks it's bananas, the judge can generally set it aside. But the judge can't set aside a jury acquittal because that would violate the right to trial by jury.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 9d ago

Are you proposing that we simply let people fire a gun at homeless people who start acting erratic on the subway? Does this state of affairs strike you as more safe for bystanders than the status quo is?

There's this point I've made before: given a constant source of dangerous people who commit loadsacrime which sometimes results in fatalities, and a lack of effective official countermeasures, the death rate is static regardless of how lethal each incident is (at least for a given ratio of deaths between perpetrator and victim; see below). This is because the dangerous people will keep committing crimes until killed by one of them going wrong, so raising the death rate per incident by a given ratio lowers the equilibrium number of these people in circulation and thus lowers the rate of incidents by the same ratio. So as a third-best solution (the first-best being removing the source of these people, in this case largely "meth", and the second-best being fixing your justice system so there are other ways of removing these people from circulation), you want to:

make the deaths hit the perpetrators as much as possible (in particular, make sure that the most lethal easily-constructed weapons are legal, because the dangerous people will probably have them anyway but law-abiding citizens won't if they're illegal), as this lowers the death rate via lowering the number of kills each dangerous person gets before dying;
jack up the death rate per incident as high as possible, because this won't affect the death rate per unit time but will lower the rate of incidents (and nonlethal crime still sucks).

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 9d ago

Burning down pharmaceuticals means that a bunch of currently-negligible bacterial infections become big threats again, and illnesses mostly-eliminated by vaccination start to come back. The worst-case scenario is probably another plague epidemic with non-modern fatality rates (there is plague in the USA; it's just very treatable with antibiotics), although modern garbage disposal might be enough to keep that at bay (pneumonic plague does spread human -> human, though).

Do not underestimate their value just because you don't have to use them all that often; IRL, maintaining a good state can be really, really cheap compared to the bad state (see: iron lung argument).

And you do still need university-equivalents to train the chemists, although this is admittedly far less urgent.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 10d ago

There is, indeed, a reason I said "some of those institutions".

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 10d ago

Yeah, obviously Vance has read SSC and Moldbug. Are there any references that are Motte-specific, though? Or indications that any of them are active members of the Ratsphere rather than lurkers?

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 10d ago

There are certain institutions which, if removed for an extended period, will result in a modern society rapidly depopulating due to the heavy optimisation required to sustain modern population densities. Military, police, public utilities, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, plus the tax collection apparatus to fund some of these, and a pipeline to train people to do these things. I'm not saying you have to preserve the specific institutions that currently do these things, but "torch them all now and then start figuring out how to replace them" won't cut it. You cannot take them all offline for months without a mountain of skulls; it'd be the Great Leap Forward all over again.

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