Shrike
2d ago
One can see why I think "this, but with criminal fines" is not a step in the right direction (although admittedly lots of administrative fines also exist).
ETA - reread and realized I wasn't sure if you were referencing the civil standard in rem civil asset forfeiture or administrative fines. Either way I think one can see why I come to the above conclusion.
Shrike
2d ago
I believe I am properly describing in rem civil asset forfeiture.
Agree that the procedure BurdensomeCount describes:
With a proper civil asset forfeiture scheme you can have rules like "if we prove to a certain standard that you did something bad then we're not just going to take the money you made through your illegal actions, we'll also come after a portion of the rest of the wealth you own"
could reference fines, which we also have in the US of A.
Shrike
2d ago
I mean that «punish» is a lousy theory of victory.
Hmm, I don't think so. Punitive expeditions are about as old as mankind. Vietnam attacked China's ally and China could either do nothing (devaluing its worth as an ally in the future) or do something. It chose to do something.
Shrike
2d ago
Evangelicals lack intellectual rigor and have outsourced that to Catholics.
I don't think this is actually true per se, but evangelical intellectuals who are known for being evangelical tend to be theologians. Evangelical intellectuals in other fields exist, but they often aren't known for their evangelicalism – and conversely, evangelical theologians often aren't known outside of evangelical communities or sub-communities. (I reckon it's very Protestant to double-down on theology, do a better job developing it than Catholics, and then mostly drop the ball in other areas because they're of "secondary importance" with the predictable consequences.)
For a variety of reasons I think Catholics are better at bridging the gap between mainstream culture and Catholic culture – one of the notable reasons being that "Catholic" isn't shorthand for "right wing" whereas "evangelical" is, which tends to make Catholic intellectuals more respectable. (However I also think it's true that the Catholics have built better mechanisms/pipelines for their intellectual elite. They deserve both kudos and study for that.)
Shrike
2d ago
a proper civil asset forfeiture scheme
Frankly I kinda doubt you are familiar with civil asset forfeiture in the US of A. Governments in the US seize an insane amount of goods through civil asset forfeiture (I believe some estimates have placed it as more than all the value of goods stolen in the United States). And the government here can seize property without proving the owner did anything illegal. In my humble opinion, this creates its own bad incentives and the proper direction is to make civil asset forfeiture harder, not easier.
Shrike
2d ago
We don't really have a good understanding of what the Sino-Vietnamese war was about.
Really? I thought it was a relatively straightforwardly punitive operation designed to punish Vietnam after Vietnam retaliated to repeated Cambodian aggression by invading Cambodia and decapitating their government (stopping the Cambodian genocide). Obviously the Vietnamese and Chinese both can claim to be the winners (Vietnam: we stopped them! China: we went as far as we needed to go to make our point!) but if the motives are obscure it's news to me. (And I would be happy to update my understanding here.)
Shrike
5d ago
Note that the paper is from 1989. It's darky hilarious how long affirmative action has been around, when for some reason many people seem to think it started sometime in the 201Xs.
Yes. On of my relatives was a career US military officer, and he described to me the methods through which his branch incentivized recruiters to find diverse applicants (this would have been roughly around 1989, a few years in either direction IIRC).
It seems to me like that the opinion that things just went off the rails recently is very common. I suspect there are a few reasons for this, one of them being the ability of the internet to form a coherent counter-consensus against institutional power, and one of them being that the forces of woke or whatever you want to call them really overextended in the 201Xs, using rhetoric that diverged from the more defensible "make society better for the marginalized" and veered into "make society worse for the unmarginalized." And then finally it seems to me that given the above, there is a very strong incentive for many people who see themselves in the middle to say "woah woah woah, [consequences downstream of X] are clearly too far," while glossing question of whether or not X should be removed since it caused the downstream consequences because fundamentally they support X, or something like X.
There are probably some other reasons I am not thinking of, but I find it interesting that, even though affirmative action has always been controversial, it seems like opposition to it has really been consolidating into something that might actually "stick" beyond grumbling about political correctness. It's interesting to me that this turn took about a generation, perhaps 1.5 generations ("affirmative action" dates to 1961) for the wheel to turn this far. A real reminder of both how slow and how fast society can change.
I do, however, suspect this may have happened before – with progressive overreach in the 1960s and 1970s fueling backlash leading to Nixon and Reagan. So I wonder if part of the "reason many people seem to think it started sometime in the 201Xs" is simply because a lot of younger people had grown up in an era where progressives/leftists were more chastened (Clinton) and cautious about letting their most radical members steal the microphone and run away with it. But by the time of Obama, they had grown overconfident again (and people who would have pushed for more moderation were aging and sidelined or dead or retired) so the fringes ran away with the microphone and now we're getting Nixon all over again. As one of the younger people, I'm not sure if it's different this time, but it does seem to me that, however you slice it, the question of wokeness definitely goes far back beyond 201X.
Shrike
7d ago
Little Billy the roving teenage delinquent wasn’t something that had always existed, he was a new phenomenon of the 1950s.
I very much doubt this. Don't have a source offhand but I suspect if I spent half an hour digging I could find people freaking out about this in the 1840s or 1870s in major urban centers like Boston or New York City. Industrialization in the US of A far predated the 1950s. If there was a new problem in the 1950s, it might have been due to the war making the practice of women working more commonplace and acceptable, thus increasing the number of unsupervised kids. But obviously women working wasn't invented during the Second World War.
We take the data we have and then posit a model that explains the data, predicts future data, and fits with what logically must be true.
The data that we have so far shows that true randomness exists and that the universe is not simulable. You ask people to accept on faith that physicalism solves this.
Your OP takes a swing at religion and (by implication) moral realism, but the interesting thing about moral realism and at least most religions is that they believe the truth is actually knowable, even though they postulate an unprovable (or at least difficult to prove) metastructure to the entire universe. Your system has all of the baggage of the unprovable metastructure but explicitly says that discovering how it works is off-limits.
Shrike
11d ago
You're now fighting the spirit of the thought experiment to make simulation an infeasible dissolving mechanism due to technicalities.
I think it is you who are fighting the spirit of the thought experiment. Mathematicians and physicists use demons in thought experiments when they want to signify a being with the capabilities you are describing.
It is, again, assuming that there is some special non-physical qualia-ness to "seeing" which can not be understood from facts and is not simulable even in principle. If you buy that, you are a dualist.
I'm okay with being called a dualist (I am a Christian) but it's funny to be called one for thinking that there is a difference between firsthand experience and knowledge of something.
Frank Jackson is using that commonsense understanding to attack physicalism. If physicalism cannot be defended without parsing a difference between understanding something from facts and experience, then perhaps it should not be defended. But of course Jackson, a physicalist, believes that the new experience of seeing the color red is caused by a physical change in the brain, and thus (as I understand it) his position is that rather than learning anything new about the color red, she's learning something about her brain.
Speaking of demons, let's talk about Laplace's demon, which you reference in your OP:
If you can see the fixed future, you cannot be surprised. With omniscience's inability to be surprised and the fixed future, the very idea of a deity "touching" the universe becomes impossible.
Now, if we accept your theory, there's no randomness at all in the universe, as you note:
Quantum randomness is just what the current state looks like from within our light cone. With a (much) longer cone, we'd see the causality.
Very well. However, if there's no randomness, it means the world is fundamentally ordered, but that such an order, although real is fundamentally unknowable. If it is fundamentally unknowable, because it is beyond our light cone, it is beyond the realm of physics. I'll let you speak on that:
If one has such an element in mind, it belongs to a separate magisterium and so the dual layers of the universe themselves are quite an expensive answer to whatever question it was you couldn't answer. Further then, any specific description of or proscriptions from other magisteria cruelly desecrate poor parsimony's corpse. I simply can't see how any rigorous thinker can go this way.
In other words, in the name of parsimony, you've constructed an entire definitionally unknowable, unprovable, and unfalsifiable metastructure that you contend the entire universe runs by.
Shrike
11d ago
The thought experiment is about a person in a room who can only receive information via a black and white television monitor. "Physical information" means "facts and information about the physical properties of red and the human perception of those properties," not "godlike access to manipulate spacetime" or something like that.
Secondly,
Having "all the physical information there is to obtain" does let you simulate - any physical process at all - given enough bits of storage and time to compute.
No. Firstly, it's actually very much in dispute that it is possible to simulate the universe, and secondly, going back to my point about changing the stipulations of a hypothetical, you're smuggling in the stipulation of infinite or finite but large amount of time and storage when those are both implied to be forbidden by the stipulations of the hypothetical, as Mary is a person who will die in less than one century, almost certainly, and her black and white television monitor would not contain even a large amount of storage.
Finally, having information does not of itself permit you to do anything with the information. Mary, in her black and white room with her black and white television monitor, does not as per the terms of the hypothetical possess the physical ability or knowledge to build a simulation of anything, let alone the experience of the color red, even if she knows everything about the color red, because knowledge of the color red does not grant her knowledge of how to build a universe simulator, and if it did, it would not grant her the ability to build it.
One could imagine a person who has memorized a few hundred lines of software code - enough for a very simple browser game. He's also an experience programmer, and has no barrier of knowledge to being able to physically program a game. Unfortunately, he is completely paralyzed due to an attack by a rogue trolley problem enthusiast. (He's also in a room, because that's how these things work, we can call it Bob's Room, or something). Obviously he possesses the information to program the game; nevertheless, he is unable to do so. Knowledge is not actually the same thing as ability.
Shrike
11d ago
Same story for Mary's room. If Mary has 100% understanding, then it's not possible for her to learn something new on seeing the apple, as she could just simulate the experience ahead of time. 100% means 0% remains, and anything else isn't part of the brain's physical system. The experiment's "insight" presupposes consciousness is not an operation of the brain.
Having understanding of a specific thing doesn't let you simulate it. Here's Mary's Room, from Wikipedia:
Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like 'red', 'blue', and so on...What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?
It's certainly true that if you change the stipulations of the thought experiment so that Mary can experience seeing red then, sure, she's not going to learn anything new when she sees red again. But it's easy to declare all hypotheticals a slam dunk if you just change the terms of the hypothetical.
Shrike
12d ago
This would make most landmines completely useless. Their value is in short to medium term area denial so you want the fields to last from weeks to some months.
While I tend to agree with you that in some cases (such as the Korean DMZ) there's massive utility in persisting mines, there are other ways to use them. If you look at how they are employed in Ukraine, you'll see both sides using rocket artillery to drop them behind enemy lines into the path of expected reinforcements or logistics. That's a much more efficient use of mines than using them as a medium term denial weapon over a broad area, and because of the placement you can expect them to be detonated, cleared, or bypassed fairly quickly, so a two-day timer probably doesn't lose you much utility at all.
Shrike
15d ago
Correction: the Jews want "us" to fight their enemies for them, again. America doesn't need to "beat Islam", it simply needs to stay out of the sandbox
Interestingly "the Jews" (Ariel Sharon, then Israeli PM) warned Bush about getting stuck in the sandbox.
Shrike
18d ago
Definitely! But that hasn't stopped it from happening.
Shrike
18d ago
A much sounder argument for American agency and responsibility for destroying European industry primarily rests in providing the British and Soviets the ammo supplies more generally to shoot the Germans and Italians
I did allude to this, yes!
The Americans of course gave much more than ammunition; they transferred tens of thousands of aircraft and dozens of ships, although my understanding is that those were compensated Lend-Lease transactions, not charity donations. In fact the aircraft transferred by the United States to Russia, if they had been transferred in one batch (they weren't) would have outnumbered the Luftwaffe at its peak strength during the war.
Attributing their loss of industry to the Americans is a wrong claim of history.
Perhaps it's a bit of a gloss, but it seems to me that, for the simple reason that the US destroyed (both directly by using American weapons delivered by American servicemen and indirectly by the provision of support) European industrial capacity, it's perfectly fine to ascribe (at least a goodly portion of!) the loss of European industrial capacity to the US.
Your point seems to be about ultimate responsibility. I was trying to make a claim about US intervention that I don't think is at odds with your claim about ultimate responsibility.
That the Americans took advantage of the European actions that destroyed the European states and empires does not mean the Americans had the agency, responsibility, or even the ability to stop them.
Is your disagreement here quibbles over a factual claim or with a moral claim that you think I am making? I'm not pushing some sort of revisionist line about how World War Two was part of some secret master American plan with the European countries being American puppets the entire time. (To finally make a criticism of the Star War prequel trilogy disguised as a point of historical commentary, if the United States had puppeted the governments of Europe in the 1930s they wouldn't have destroyed their own investments.)
Shrike
18d ago
The Russian stuff was better than the Ukrainian stuff. The Ukrainians were fighting with
- US/NATO weapons
- Much more importantly, US/NATO intelligence apparatus. Since Russia has no desire to fight NATO and Ukraine at once, it didn't shoot down US satellites, ISR aircraft, etc. meaning that in a very real sense Ukraine had an easier time of it, in some ways, than NATO would have during a shooting war with Russia.
If Russia had just been fighting Ukraine I think it's very plausible the results would have been "as predicted." My recollection was that NATO intelligence was responsible for ensuring the Ukrainians responded to Hostomel in something like a timely manner. The odds of the Russian shock attack succeeding look much better, I think, if the Russians successfully complete an airbridge and start rolling over Kiev in the opening hours of the war.
Shrike
19d ago
I think we actually know what the US win situation looks like, because we already saw it happen.
Picture this: the Chinese decide that their window is closing but they have a moment of opportunity (perhaps after a US or Taiwanese presidential election). Their plan is really simple: surround Taiwan with troops and ships doing increasingly provocative exercises to demonstrate Taiwanese weakness, give Taiwan an ultimatum of some sort (e.g. "stop buying US military hardware") and then when it is denied, a limited ballistic missile strike on Taiwanese C&C facilities, combined with a lightning heliborne assault to seize a port, coordinated with a large amphibious landing. The Chinese decide not to open with an attack on Japan and the US, reasoning that the thousands of ballistic missiles they have in reserve will send a clear deterrent signal and the Taiwanese will give in under the shock of the offensive, capitulating as soon as it is clear that a bridgehead is established, an estimation made based on accurate intelligence assessments of Taiwanese will to resist.
And this is basically correct: just like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the US and its allies don't militarily intervene. Unfortunately for China, just like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Chinese government keeps their ultimate plans secret from their own leadership until the last minute for reasons of operational security. This means that the United States, with its sophisticated signals intelligence apparatus, actually has a clearer picture of the battlefield than the Chinese commanders on the ground. This allows the US to do the in-real-life equivalent of "streamsniping" the Chinese, directly transmitting targeting coordinates and other intelligence to Taiwan, while Chinese commanders are operating largely in their own lane, without broader situational awareness of the battlefield. The air assault troops are met by an armored brigade and cut to pieces; ballistic missiles are intercepted or hit empty buildings and airfields; Taiwanese antiship missiles (guided by US assets in orbit, allowing them to hit assets the Taiwanese are blind to) strike vulnerable Chinese naval flotillas that are traveling with their air search radars stowed to avoid broadcasting their position, and the Chinese amphibious assault/port seizure operation runs into a recently planted minefield and is ignominiously sunk by mines designed during the First World War and artillery shells designed during the Second in the last mile before the beach. The survivors are eliminated by tanks and helicopters without making a significant bridgehead.
And that's it. Because the difference between the invasion of Ukraine (where substantially similar events took place but merely shifted the mode of the war) and the invasion of Taiwan is that Russia has a land border with Ukraine and no problem consolidating whatever gains they have, pulling more tanks out of their stockpiles and drafting more men if their first push fails. But an amphibious landing is a much more binary thing, and when the Chinese lose a third of their amphibious and air assault transport capacity? They can't call a time out and build more ships, or dig in and hold ground, as the Russians did. Ten years worth of procurement underwater or stranded on a beach in 72 hours. Sure, the Chinese still have a large fleet of second-tier ships, including many transports, but those will be, if anything, less survivable than the purpose-built amphibious fleet they've lost, and the Taiwanese still have a cool five digits of contact mines in their inventories.
Now, in this situation, the Chinese could attempt a blockade, or nuclear threats. But we're angling for an at least somewhat plausible hypothetical best case scenario for the US here (not necessarily the most likely scenario) so we'll say instead the government collapses in the face of thousands of casualties with nothing substantial to show for it and the military remove the Secretary General from power.
Most likely scenario? Eh, I wouldn't bet on this happening. Possible? Sure, I think so.
Shrike
19d ago
I don't disagree with your point about the Europeans shooting themselves in the foot, but by the same token of agency and responsibility, the Americans of the day did not merely sit around and let their country become the last economy standing by default (even though isolationism was probably a live option); they took advantage of the situation to better their own standing (perhaps some would argue not as much as they should have due to sympathies with and penetration by the Soviets).
Shrike
19d ago
Just accepting all of this for the argument instead of quibbling (and I think there's a lot of quibbling that could be done, but Second World War bombing campaigns aren't really my area of expertise, so possibly I'm just wrong) the US was still an important part of the post-war partition, and an important part of the Soviet Union's victory in the East, and an important part in the reindustrialization or, if you prefer, continued industrialization of Germany after the war through the Marshall Plan, to say nothing of the shelling, urban fighting, and sabotage that you mention (and of course removing German scientists after the war to serve the United States).
My broader point, though, is that, despite the Iron Curtain, the world was the United State's oyster in a very real way in 1950 that it is not for China in 2025.
Shrike
20d ago
I wouldn't say it's opposed - the Europeans started the war, the United States finished the war (in part) by strategically bombing Germany and its allies/occupied territories (including France, Italy, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Austria, the Netherlands).
Shrike
21d ago
I don't see how Western industry can compete without actively improving infrastructure to drive cost reductions.
My understanding is that China heavily subsidizes their auto industry. I don't know that this is necessarily a bad thing, particularly if you are getting something off of the ground, but it's not necessarily clear to me that Chinese cars will be able to compete at this level long-term. The strategy here is perhaps similar to that once practiced in the US by monopolies: undercut hostile industry to kill it, then raise prices to whatever you want.
N.b. I am not a China booster
Noted, although do forgive me if I forget (I don't always track usernames well...)
Western stagnation is recent, but deep - and in these conversations, we tend to embrace the worse possible choices; for less short term pain guaranteeing great pain later.
Yes, I do think this is a huge problem. But it's not unique to the West and it's not clear to me that China's coherent planning is actually going to be a win for them over the medium and long term.
Shrike
21d ago
if China is just 1950s America, and 1950s America was just 19th century Britain, aren't we headed for the same stagnation and broad irrelevance of the UK today?
I think this is too fuzzy an analogy to be much help.
In the 1950s the United States had quite recently literally destroyed the infrastructure of its major European competitors and made sure that only plausible hostile industrial competitor was thousands of miles away and surrounded by friendly client states. Compared to America of 1950, China doesn't have such an advantage, it has a dramatically worse age pyramid, and a worse debt-to-GDP ratio to boot. In fact, this is even true of China compared to America of 2025. To the extent that "America in 1950" describes any country in 2025, it's, uhhh, well it's the United States.
I don't think that "gamifying" politics will revolutionize it for the same reason that various attempts to gamify productivity haven't resulted in a massive productivity boom. This doesn't mean that such an app is necessarily a bad idea inasmuch as it might be a net positive, but I tend to doubt it's going to "make things fun" or at least fun enough to dramatically change political life.
When I was an undergraduate student, I was offered a free tablet and told it would be "fun" (I knew some of the people involved and yes did enjoy hanging out with them) if I minded a bunch of high schoolers as part of a GOTV effort. It didn't sound fun to me, regardless of the inducements, and I declined. Now, obviously, the model employed by that organization wasn't flawed: that was enough inducement for enough people to make their effort work! But if those weightier inducements didn't work on me I doubt "gamifying" it will induce most people, even regular voters, to do things like activism or volunteering.
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