RobertLiguori
No bio...
User ID: 165
RobertLiguori
1mo ago
As time goes on, I'm leaning more and more towards simply rejecting Rationalism, as it leads to cudgels like "falsely claimed without evidence" beloved by the mainstream media.
Reject Rationalism, embrace rationalism.
That is to say, movements will be corrupted by status games and politics, but ideas remain true or false regardless. It is rational to observe the degree to which the mainstream media is attempting to manipulate public opinion with both carefully-crafted deceptions, repetition of lies, and aggression towards alternate sources of info, and write them off. It is rational to note how science with the wrong conclusion is buried or never even attempted and to see how the universities have purged themselves of wrongthinkers, and write them off as well.
It is rational to recognize that the words of a liar are very poor evidence. And it is not rational to deny that a liar is a liar and call it charity.
RobertLiguori
3mo ago
So what percentage of contentious traffic stops in which the driver disobeys police instructions do you think have the police open fire first?
Because there are a lot of dashcam and bodycam vids which show, undeniably, that the vast majority of police do not do what you are claiming they do. How many do you think you'd need to see to think differently?
RobertLiguori
4mo ago
I think we have a working model for what people with working knowledge of firearms, access to long guns, and willingness to go into hot war with D.C. will be; it might not be an insurgency, but instead, dozens of D.C. snipers operating in tandem, and specifically targeting the tyrant and their supporters.
Obviously, only the barest fraction of people who talk the boogaloo game would do anything but hand over their guns and seethe when push comes to shove. But as the D.C. sniper shows us, it doesn't take a lot of people to utterly fuck things up. Add in things like targeted sabotage of the power grid in key areas and a few more Oklahoma City bombings, and I think that the government could run out of state capacity very quickly.
RobertLiguori
6mo ago
My opinion is that morality is not relative, but neither is it universally shared. Morality is a way for people willing and capable of positive-sum interactions to interact with each other. If you are not willing and able, you are not a moral actor, and likewise, dealing with you is a matter of pragmatism, not morality. You can have a moral war (or at least a war with moral aspects), if both sides are willing to agree on values like "Killing civilians for no significant military gain is wrong." and formalize combat to keep the fighting out of the fields and towns; when one side violates that agreement, then that is no longer a moral issue.
Again, I agree with the wolf; I agree that the wolf and those who carry water for him can and will disregard both honor and morality, and tear down every house and building to loot the rubble for themselves and their fellow-travelers.
A pretty elementary tenant of morality, or reasoning in general, is that you need to be alive to do it (or at least for other people that share your ideals to continue in your stead). If you choose to lay down and be devoured, because you feel that it's as good for the wolf to enjoy your flesh as a meal as for you to keep living in it, then that's on you. And if you hold to a morality that says that the above is the highest virtue, then that morality will end when it runs out of practitioners.
I honestly don't see this as something that can be meaningfully argued. Either you read the above comic and reach for your gun (or give fervent thanks to those around you who pick up the gun on your behalf), or you don't; if you don't, then you're not likely to share enough values with those who do to make discussing it worthwhile.
Morality is way for people who share values to coordinate and make great things. But it is only that. Absent shared values, there is only the pigs shooting every wolf, or the wolves devouring every pig.
RobertLiguori
6mo ago
The wolf is factually correct that private property requires force, because Communists (and other thieves and despoilers exist). You cannot trust in the bricks of contract law to willing parties to save you, absent men willing and able to do violence on your behalf.
When dealing with wolves (or when wolves deal with you), there is no 'right' in the moral sense; that only applies when you are dealing with moral actors interacting with each other. If we were talking about pigs, or other people who had signed contracts, then we can discuss if they were right or wrong for how they followed their contracts, and even if contract law is the highest form of morality and if there are some contracts that shouldn't be enforced, but (if I may delve into the spicy takes) the correct response to wolves is not negotiation, not diplomacy, but large amounts of armed men, and probably helicopters.
RobertLiguori
6mo ago
If the state has argued beyond reasonable doubt that one of two men has done an exclusive action, then they have also argued that there is reasonable doubt that the other hadn't.
Of course, the court system is a sham that hides its constant hypocrisies behind pomp and Latin, so neither the facts of the world nor even the facts of other court cases actually matter when judge and jury decide that precedent is optional today, but in a court system of professionals bound to their oath and juries capable of reason, convicting one person for a singular crime should exclude anyone else from being convicted of that crime.
As an aside, you can also have things like the felony murder rule, where "You did a felony and a murder happened as a direct result." is the argument, not "You murdered.", and in that paradigm, you absolutely can have multiple people convicted of the same murder, but that's not the same as lying to the court about what you think the evidence shows happened, as needs to happen to argue for two different versions of events.
RobertLiguori
6mo ago
"We'll have peace only if and when every last Palestinian renounces violence and accepts the status quo, and until then, we'll keep bombing," no, there will never be peace. At the moment, that does seem to be Israeli policy.
Wait, why not? If Israel decided to ignore optics, accept whatever level of collateral damage as was necessary, and bombed every Palestinian that didn't renounce violence, and only bombed them, then Israel would stop when only the non-irredeemable non-vengeance-monsters were left, and there'd be no more violence, yes?
I mean, given the current state of Palestinian culture, this would be at least genocide in the wholescale and eradication of their culture, and would probably end up being genocide in terms of actual real genocide, yes, but that would stop the violence.
RobertLiguori
7mo ago
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself, including ineffectual and vile acts of revenge such as murdering the women and children of those who wronged you.
Then unless you fall into your own bullet one above, you've got your justification not just for Israel's extremely restrained and humane war, but for actual full-on retaliation. Palestinians literally are the criminal mafia you use metaphor to compare to Jews, they are actively and currently targeting Jewish civilians for the purpose of unrestrained murder, so by your reasoning, we should be pro-Israel and support them because they are, by and large, not shooting Palestinian children because they imagine them to be related to mob bosses and mocking them.
There is no ethical principle other than "Whites bad" (or other general Who, Whom?) that condemns Israel while not condemning not just the Palestinians, but the vast majority of the Arab countries for their historic displacements and exterminations of Christians and Jews. If "That screaming child I just killed was related to people who have wronged me." is understandable justification for said killing, then Israel is justified seven times fucking seventy; if that is not a principle you are willing to endorse generally, then you are starting from the position that the acts of violence that the Palestinians are committing are unjustified and monstrous, and you have a practical answer.
As a calibration question, I'm curious what you think of the Allies's campaign in WWII. Do you sympathize with the modern Neo-Nazi arguments that the firebombing of Dresden was an abomination, that the mass destruction of civilian life is never justified, and thus Nazi resistance to Allied occupation was justified then and justified now? Were the lives of the German civilians that died in Dresden precious enough that the war effort should have been forestalled?
I recognize that Nazi comparisons are emotive and can shed more heat than light, but I also recognize that the "Jews are literally all organized criminal gangsters, down to the children." is ticking boxes off of my Historical Anti-Semitism bingo card I did not expect to see in ${CURRENT_YEAR}, and feel that the potentially-inflammatory barn door is opened.
RobertLiguori
7mo ago
Huh. So you can make a husky act like a basset hound in terms of general laid-backness and temperament with a single gene tweak?
Respectfully, I doubt this. Can you link any sources to this effect?
RobertLiguori
7mo ago
Then please, build your own argument. We can look at the various breeds of dogs and see how they vary in behavioral traits, and then compare dogs as a whole to wolves, and see that within a species, all of the above traits are strongly influenced by lineage, and that while you can give a pitbull a gentle and caring upbringing and abuse a golden retriever into being violent, equal treatment of the animals does not result in equal behaviors.
The features of living creatures are strongly influenced by their specific biology, and the specifics of that biology is inherited from their parents. It is not controversial that the apple does not fall far from the tree, and traits that are genuinely randomly distributed and uncorrelated entirely with showing up in your family history are very few and far between. It is not controversial that this is the case; it is heretical to the tenents of the Successor Religion, but not actually controversial on the underlying facts, the theory, or the observed results.
If you want to argue otherwise on any of those points, please do so. Because otherwise, objecting solely on procedural grounds makes it obvious that there are no arguments against them you can make, and that shame and procedural arguments is the strongest claim the anti-HBD side can stake out.
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
Who has more power, Larry Summers, or some asshole with a rifle, the knowledge to use it correctly, and a willingness to die in the process of murdering Larry Summers?
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
Yeah, a lot of people fail to lean into the idea that D&D kingdoms that embrace leveling are, functionally, anarchic, and that there is no functional inherited monarchy anywhere, because power doesn't flow from the will of the people or having an overwhelming army, it flows from character levels, which can't be transferred or removed. It means that you can have the storybook endings where you kill the Evil Overlord and that does legitimately end the threat, but it also means that once anyone in an area reaches high enough level, they become de facto immune to the local government, and they get a veto over it that they can enforce with violence themselves.
Try to raise taxes on the retired high-level fighter? He can take a month off to go to the capital and murder everyone in the royal family and most of their defenders. Planning a military campaign against a nearby nation that would threaten the importation of the specific cultivar of hops that the retired adventurer prefers for his ale? Better hope he doesn't hear of it and show up to kill you and your army first.
And that's just the martial types. The high-level rogues can do all of this without you having any idea who they are or why they're doing it; it just is known that attempting certain kinds of governmental actions gets you murdered in your bed without anyone knowing who did it or how, and there's just too many categories of nation-state-level fuckery that high-level primary casters can commit to list here.
That being said, you get some fun results when you lean into the implications. In a campaign world I ran, there was an inn run by a full-on retired demigod who ended up being a sort of one-building buffer state between a kingdom and an empire; neither of the states risked any kind of military action in the area for fear of provoking him into leaving retirement, and both sides also ceded a good amount of unofficial territory where they didn't try to enforce their will just to make sure that no civic official got lost and made a nation-ending mistake. The results of all this was that I had a nice little low-level zone carved out for the PCs to start their adventure and learn about both nations and the world in general, and let them experience gentle scaling as they moved away from their starting area, plus give them a growing mystery when they returned periodically.
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
I'd say that it feels about the same, myself. The rules of war are there to protect good actors, and to provide a Schelling point that enemies can agree on before hostilities. If your enemy abuses surrender and commits perfidy, then you shoot their wounded. If they hide among civilians, you bomb the civilians. And if they disassemble their farming infrastructure and use it to make rockets to shoot at you, then you bomb their farms, blockade their ports, and starve them out, until they cease hostilities and offer surrender with a commitment that you can trust.
In this specific case, I am reasonably sure that surrender would be total evacuation or death at this point. But if Japan's morale had not been broken by the atomic bombs, if they were continuing to perform Rapes of Nanking with their dwindling resources, and nestling their army inside their civilian population, then yeah, the moral action is to start with Tokyo and keep up the firebombing until the evil is defeated and the threat is gone.
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
In a game, the rules are reflective of the players' shared understanding of the game world, and when the rules fail to reflect that understanding, they are bad rules.
And obviously the GM can decide things. The GM can decide that Iomedae is a foxgirl in a kinky BDSM relationship with Asmodeus. But that is not reflected in either the rules or the setting documents, and people are quite right to complain that referring to someone who was called Iomeade and differed significantly, and in unannounced and weird ways from what was established.
And, while I'll probably do a whole bit on this later, Iomedae comes from a world where the nation she is from (the Taldoran Empire) actually did mass emigration in an explicitly colonialist way. And, of course, they had to deal with foreign invaders entering their lands as well. I can absolutely buy an Iomedae that sympathizes with the plight both of specific illegal immigrants and of their host nation, and wishes there was a way to both fulfill the law and grant security to the immigrants. But describing border security as evil are not the words of any paladin anywhere, much less the words of a paladin otherwise-fated to be a god of paladins that worships a Lawful-Neutral god of human civilization.
The author could have picked a generic paladin from an unspecified setting, or even a generic paladin from Golarion. They did not. They chose a paladin with a history and her own views. Obviously, the author and the readers have the right to tell me and everyone else "Fuck you, I'm doing it my way, and I'm also making Aroden trans, cope and seethe.", and equally-obviously, I have the right to tell the author that she's doing it wrong, as I have above and probably will again.
And hey, if you want to get into a detailed dive on the established lore of Golarion and its gods and claim that I'm misrepresenting Aroden, Iomeade, paladins, or the Taldoran Empire, please feel free. Hell, if anyone knows if there are PF2e adventure paths or lore books that ret-con any of these topics, I'd be genuinely interested to hear about them.
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
You know what? Fuck it. No idea how long this will last, because I'm also doing something similar for Wheel of Time in meatspace at the moment and my hate-reading time is limited, but here we go: https://robertliguoriwritesstuff.wordpress.com/2023/09/05/well-i-guess-im-liveblogging-now/
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
Ah, I haven't touched PF2E at all, so that explains it. I guess it will be really important to find out what actual rules the fic is operating under.
The vaccines look interesting, but also not at all like something that naturally would interact with an immune system; how would they work if the lesser ones only work for 24 hours? Maybe they're just releasing tiny alchemical homunculi into your bloodstream.
Re: diseases being updated, you could presumably slap a bunch of dire rats in an Antimagic Field to detect that and study the effect, which sounds interesting. If you want to run your setting that way, you might have an entire laundry list of effects the gods need to personally micromanage to keep the Prime Material from falling askew, and introduce some interesting effects when adventurers go off-grid themselves.
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
Starfinder takes place in the same universe as Pathfinder (probably; history in Starfinder is weird), but several metaphysical things in Starfinder are different. (Also, you know, practical things.)
Regardless, in both systems, creatures do not have memory T cells; you make the same saving through the first time you get bit by a dire rat with filth fever as the thousandth time, even if it is the same rat biting you. The vaccine is also made with Starfinder hypertech, so I don't know that we can say that it works anything like the conventional term; it might just be some very-narrowly-tailored nanobots that do what a conventional immune system would do, if people had immune systems instead of Fort saves.
I actually checked the SRD, and I found exactly one reference to vaccines in first-party Pathfinder materials: the drug Gossamer Veil (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/afflictions/drugs/gossamer-veil/), which, amusingly, has the following description:
Cultists of Ghlaunder [a demon lord] and manipulators wander the streets of impoverished neighborhoods, administering this “vaccine” to prevent diseases common in squalid conditions, often with an admonition that it remains effective only as long as the recipient maintains faith in the priest’s deity.
Again, the world of Golarion has entirely different mechanics for disease, but more than that, it has entirely different social institutions, built around gods as observable and present as Elon Musk is in our world. "Why the fuck aren't your priests of Jesus healing the sick, as is normal and natural? What is wrong with them that they can't perform the simplest duty of a good cleric, and channel positive energy to help people?" should be her starting point. And because she is literally the alternate-life of a goddess, she should find alchemical ways of preventing disease sus as fuck, because in a world where you can go to any good cleric and get any conventionial disease cleared as long as you are not actually physically dead, not going to goodly clerics to get that care is sus as fuck, unless you're in a part of the world with unusually low access to goodly clerics?
And you know what people generally don't have the training, infrastructure, and general capacity to do in those parts of the world? Become paladins!
Now, I am just going off of the standard SRD and Archives of Nethys as a backup, so if there is a solid reference to vaccines in Pathfinder proper, I may be missing it, and if you know of one, I'd be happy to hear it. But regardless, even if they worked, they would not work as an extension of how people understand how disease works, because in Pathfinder, barring there being a specific Milkmaid background trait that gives a bonus to pox-related illness, you can't observe "Hey, milkmaids and other people who work with cows tend to get the lesser-in-lethality cowpox and tend to be more resistant to smallpox, I wonder why and if we can replicate this somehow." What there are are people who can fuck around with the wrecked space shit in Numeria and maybe get some stuff partially right, but much more likely, what you have are (as we, ironically enough, do have) demon-affiliated fuckers preying on people's hopes that there is a reliable way to handle disease other than divine magic. (Or, like, alchemists or other use-the-spell-mechanic fuckery.)
Iomedae sounds like an idiot on the subject of immigration, because she's very clearly being an author-mouthpiece. Does she have an opinion on whether or not Cheliax, if they found a way to replicate her journey, should be able to start sending evangelists of Asmodeus over en masse? Or is the point that because she has access to at-will detect evil, she doesn't understand how when dealing with mere mortals, we can't just march her in front of every immigrant and have her decapitate the evil ones, and let the rest pass on through? I wonder what she'd think of a cabal of mortal wizards who started mass-binding souls in order to shove them into whatever Pathfinder's version of Mount Celestia is. Or the Worldwound, for that matter.
Actually, there are a bunch of things I'd want her to run into. In Pathfinder (and in almost every edition of D&D), humans are not sexual dimorphic in ability spread; men are taller and heavier than women in nearly every race, but this does not affect their attribute spread. So, does she have a low-level melee-combatant attribute spread or an actual teenage girl attribute spread? And how does she react to, in the first case, learning that compared to what she's used to, men and women might as well be half-orcs and halflings when it comes to their distributions of upper body strength? If we assume that she has Str 16 (since she's a legendary hero before level-up bonuses and, as a paladin, suffers from Multiple Attribute Dependency) and we use the rather generous PF carrying capacity table, she can lift 460 lbs off the ground, which (as I understand from a casual google) would smash the world record for people in the average teenage girl weight class.
It also sounds like the religion thing is nuanced at least, but I feel like that the world of Pathfinder is ontologically different enough that I don't see her views on religion mapping well enough to ours to have a strong opinion on Jesus as an actual historical figure or actual Outsider with a divine rank. Maybe he was a guy who rose from the dead; that happens more often than not if you die around powerful users of divine magic. Maybe he's a god or a demigod or a name given to another god; the world is aggresively syncretic and no god created the universe, nor actually defines it in any meaningful way; important things like Good and Evil predate the gods and will outlive them, and while gods, even Iomedae's own patron deity, might be deeply important to her, she should know that being a paladin demands that she follow Good first and her god's commandments second, if the two ever collide.
Honestly, I am a little melancholy about the fact that I'm deep enough to the weeds of Pathfinder to find the premise of this story really interesting, but that I also know just from the summary I was given that I'm going to be running heavily into places where the story either warps to progressive shibboleths and loses me as a result. Which is a shame, because I feel like a based author that was willing to respond to questions about America's policy on immigration and secularism by sending a paladin to a cartel-controlled town in Mexico or a fundamentalist-Islam-controlled stronghold in Afganistan would be really narratively interesting.
I also feel like there's a much more hilarious story about weird-ass Underdark radiation fucking up and dropping good ol' Drizzt Do'urden into our world as opposed to Icewind Dale, and have him have to undergo a whole lot of different learning experiences.
ETA: Fucking hell, didn't make it off the first page before getting pissed off again. You know what also doesn't exist in Pathfinder? Acquired immunity. People don't get resistant to filth fever by hanging around in a dungeon repeatedly, because pathogens are not germ-based in Iomeade's world. The correct response to "Let me give you a little bit of unclean taint to make you stronger and teach you to fight it off." is "Back the fuck off, spawn of Lamashtu and Apollyon, I know how potions that heal the sick work and that is not it, you lying bastard." There are also a lot fewer lethal diseases unless you use the optional rules to make diseases extra-lethal, and there's low-level divine magic to help with sick people, and if Iomeade has hit third level herself than she's entirely immune, and that should be part of her understanding of the world.
Part of rationalism is engaging with the world as it is, not as you've been told (or are being told) that it is. This would have been a perfect chance for Iomeade to have expressed a solid opinion and been given the chance to learn that this was not her world (and, as the other people dug deeper, to learn that she was not from their world), but there is no world in which being told about vaccines shouldn't map to one of the many plague cultists fucking with people. Hell, even if Iomeade had seen enough of this world to recognize that things were different here, this should still be a point in which she has opinions, beyond "Really? Cool!"
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
My own personal answer is red, for the general reasons delineated below.
For the people who choose blue: does the presence of this vigorous debate change your opinions any? I know that while my first thought was red, the fact that this has become a thing, and that there is no obvious common consensus, is more than enough to permanently cement me on Team Red. How much baseline expectation of people picking red no matter what do you need before your choice comes down to "Everyone who picks blue dies, which includes me." and "Everyone who picks blue dies, which doesn't include me?"
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
Can you talk a bit more about what you mean by a modern food environment? As far as I know, fatness isn't evenly distributed across populations, and it's not that hard to find subgroups and cultures with much less obesity than we observe as the baseline in America.
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
The stats in many ways do lie. Put someone in poverty. Add violence to their upbringing. Have them be young and male. You have a recipe for ciminality. Many of the people in this position in certain countries happen to be black. It is not them being black that is causing them to be criminal. Being able to identify a white person that was raised in these circumstances is purely advantageous.
You are wrong here three ways, I think. First, even if we assume that only poverty, violence (which came from where, I wonder?), and average age are the only factors that predict criminality, you can't know someone's upbringing, income level, and actual age just by looking at them for a moment. You can know their race. And if it just so happens that there's so much poverty, violence, and demographic distortion in the black community that they do 60% of the murdering, then no, the stats don't lie, you should avoid black people, because when you see black skin you see an indicator of possible violence.
Second, you are simply directly wrong. Go ahead, dig up the stats of people of various races by income level. Let's look at whether the generation of Jews immediately after the holocaust jumped up to black-like levels of violence and criminality. Compare the actual cohorts by age and sex, and show me what those stats look like. Being black doesn't make you a criminal, any more than being drunk makes you get into traffic accidents. Some people can drive drunk just fine, and some people who are perfectly sober kill themselves and others, and you can absolutely find someone who is a better driver drunk that most people are sober. But just like the population of drunk people are much worse drivers overall, the population of black people is much more criminal overall.
Black people are in poverty not because they are discriminated against, but because they're black (and everything that entails on the collective level), just like Jewish people are prospering not because of the protocols of their Zionish elders, but because they're Jewish. The violence in their upbringing is because they are raised by and around other black people, who do that violence, because they are black. They are disproportionately young because they have higher death rates, due both to violence and to poor health outcomes, frequently caused by poor diet and general health maintenance, because they are black.
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
So, presumably, if we, the non-leaders of Harvard and Yale believe in not being racist, we should be the ones to tear the schools to the ground, and disclaim their elite leanings as self-serving sophistry.
Also, can you elaborate on the superiority of Harvard students that you experienced? It sounds like that if you instead sampled top-academic Jews in the last century, and Asians in this century, you'd find better academics; if they weren't better than the Harvard crop, then the Harvard crop wouldn't need to change the rules.
My personal instinct is that it may be that the Harvard brand is about baffling people with bullshit over actually producing quality scholarship; I can point to the fact that they are doing bald-faced lying about the affirmative action as evidence in favor of bullshit and against good scholarship. Is there a way that you can confirm your impression? How do you know that you have not been baffled with bullshit yourself and that the amazing Harvard scholars are actually as amazing as you think?
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
How do you get handed the keys to the most beloved IP's there are, with passionate fandoms falling over themselves to rain cash on you for merch, something that's effectively been a cultural icon for decades, and turn it into a hot pile of steaming crap that no one wants to get 10 yards within?
People don't love the old IPs because of the bits that are IPable. Indy's whip is cool and distinctive, but people don't love every character that uses a whip like Indy as much as Indy, because the movies are a whole bunch of skillful performances crafted by a distinct vision, and that's what people loved; the whip and hat were just immediately-identifyable bits of that. And when a licensed IP holder puts out less effort than a blatant-ripoff hopefully-confuse-someone-on-the-Netflix-screen schlockfest as their production strategy, why would anyone want to see a movie by the IP holder?
If a pie brand that people love adds a blueberry pie to their apple and pear pie lineup, then people will probably buy the blueberry pie. But if the pie company changes and slowly begins shrinking portions and adulterating their most expensive ingredients, then the goodwill of the brand will fade. And if the company just starts selling you kale salads with the pie logo on, then not only will people who like pie and got invested with the company because they made good pie not buy them (or at least, not buy them twice), then the pie brand will quickly become worthless, as people who like pie recognize the brand as the opposite of a symbol of quality.
It just used to be the case that we could assume that most piemakers at least had on their priority list of making good pies as part of their business. We can't any more.
RobertLiguori
1yr ago
I think there's an extra pole in there. My own model is (and note that these are deliberately twee and modern-vocab terms) Chad, Normie, and Degen. Chads exist as a result of hard times, and are both the stereotypical hard men of the saying, and further them via violence and intra-Chad competition. Normies move hard times to good times as the result of cooperation and coordination. And Degens exploit the social structures of Normies, weakening them to the point where the structure no longer benefits people, and then people either drift away or some combination of environmental pressure and incomnig Chads breaks the organization entirely, you get chaos, the Chads start to thrive, and the cycle begins again. It was noted belowthread that the grand Teutonic war machine lost out to the likes of Audie Murphy and his ilk; that is absolutely the case. It is also the case that, generations later, that ilk lost out utterly to Afgans with AKs and IEDs, both in actual military conflict, and in the battle for hearts and minds.
Basically, you've got a three-pole attractor scenario, a lot like male lizard mating strategies 1. I'm also open to better name suggestions for the three groups, but I feel that the names I picked are evocative enough to justify them.
In this specific type of lizards, you've got monogamous lizards, alpha large-territory-holding lizards, and pass-as-female-to-sneakily-mate-with-the-actual-females lizards. Monogamous lizards get driven out by alphas, alphas get cucked by infiltrators, and infiltrators don't pass well enough to fool monogamous lizards and can't successfully cuck them.
The only real sign we're near the end-zone is when we can ask a model how to make a better model, and get useful feedback which makes a model which can give us more and better advice.
I certainly foresee plenty of disruption when we reach the point of being willing to replace people with AI instances on a mass level, but until the tool allows for iterative improvement, it's not near the scary speculation levels.
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