4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
<3
User ID: 355
I think a US "withdrawal" coupled with an EU "entry" could curiously be the closest to an actual winning strategy for the Western bloc in this war.
From the start, the war has been defined by a curious dynamic where the fence-sitting audience was in a way more important than the combatants actually fighting. Russia does not want to fight against anything resembling the actual full industrial power of the EU and US; Ukraine wants more of it, and can't bear to lose it; meanwhile, the fence-sitters want Ukraine to win, but they don't actually want to suffer deprivations, and it would take a lot of moral outrage to get them to come to terms with having to cut back on the occasional cute latte or family vacation. As a consequence, Russia has to fight with several hands tied behind its back - it can't produce too many Gaza-like pictures of historical city cores reduced to rubble, maimed children and crying mothers, can't just sink every single ship entering or leaving Odessa, has to allow the lights to be on occasionally, and can't give the Germans a meltdown by just taking out the NPPs already. (And then, of course, there is the actual logistical support backbone that is on sovereign NATO territory and they can't risk touching at all.) To an extent, they can afford going on like this because Ukraine, too, has to hold back - its PR allowance is generous but not infinite, and so we have not seen Belgorod reduced to rubble or random high-rises in Moscow 9/11ed. I reckon even some matters of inanimate logistics are dominated by this - Russia has not knocked out the bridges across the Dnipro because the symbolism of destroying such a recognisable piece of civilian infra could also result in a watershed of Western support, and Ukraine has given up its attempts on the Crimean bridge because if it did blow successfully the Russians might figure Westerners would be less shocked and appalled if it blew up major bridges across the Dnipro in return.
If the West goes all in against Russia, this consideration is out. Of course in a few years, if the war stays conventional, the West would still win easily - but I would expect the immediate effect to actually be a swing in the favour of Russia, as they could immediately and trivially knock out all centralised power in Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe and firebomb Ukrainian cities with no regard for optics, which would significantly hamper the main workhorse of Ukrainian resistance that is the ability to mass-produce FPV drones in nondescript basements and commercial spaces hidden in residential areas. The end effect would be a scouring of Ukraine and significant damage to everything on all sides, and depending on how the escalation spiral plays out around going nuclear the West might even still chicken out and settle before its industrial might is fully retooled towards war.
On the other hand, if the US makes a point of staying out, the dynamic from before more or less continues unchanged, except now Ukraine also has all of Europe's military heft on its side. Russia will be left wondering at every step whether they can really afford to do the militarily necessary, or it will produce pictures that will push the US public and Trump over the edge after all, and it is probably in fact true that even a few civilian casualties in Germany will piss off the US much more than the same casualties are doing in Ukraine. As a result, their fear will force them to continue their current piecemeal strategy of poking at the Ukrainian front, while Europe gradually cranks up its production and gains experience until eventually even the belated decision to firebomb Kiev would not really make a difference anymore.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
2d ago
In your eyes, is there any threshold that Trump could cross with his actions whereupon making a show of being opposed to them would no longer show one's "true colors as a rabid partisan"?
As I see it, the unpersoning thing is a valid, if silly and ill-thought-through, answer to the question of what the judiciary could do if its orders are ignored by someone too powerful to go after with the forces at its direct disposal. If you think it's an "rabid partisan" thing to consider, then, it seems that you think that someone who is not a partisan or not rabid should not be thinking about ways the judiciary could enforce its will in this case at all. Do you believe that Trump has a mandate to power uncircumscribed by the judiciary?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
7d ago
I hope you don't mind that I took this very nearly explicit "try and ID me" challenge as such! I quickly found an individual that seems to match the profile drawn by your opening post exceedingly well, but I can't see the associated photo as depicting the same person as the iPhone ad video you linked before. Is this just coincidence, my borderline faceblindness striking, or did you actually borrow someone else's biography for camouflage/misdirection?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
9d ago
Right, I'm reasonably familiar with them but wasn't terribly impressed. They only really brought the "anyone can make a board" thing as an innovation, nothing about the posting system itself apart from some QoL improvements that had accumulated on altchans over the years. Compare to how 2ch->Futaba involved the addition of images.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
9d ago
I wonder if 4chan getting hit by the bus will enable some innovation in the anonymous posting space (like how Futaba Channel/4chan's direct Japanese template first flowered as a replacement when 2ch/its text-only predecessor went down), or the whole concept was just waiting for its overdue demise. Any interesting alternatives to watch?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
11d ago
Well, it is, but how much do we know about the CO part of the equation? There seem to be often-cited figures for calories burned by various activities, but for example it seems quite obvious that whatever people poop out is not actually of zero caloric value, and that moreover the difference between, say, diarrhea and wombat poop cubes must be nontrivial, but this seems to never be addressed in those arguments.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
12d ago
If it turns out that our current approach to AI fizzles out at von-Neumann IQ levels, then all is good as historically, that is not sufficient intelligence to take over the world.
Well, we don't know. We ran this experiment with one von Neumann, or maybe a handful, but not with a datacenter full of von Neumanns running at 100x human speed. While we don't know if the quality of a single reasoner can be scaled far beyond what is humanly possible, with our understanding of the technology it is almost certain that the quantity will (as in, we can produce more copies more cheaply and reliably than we can produce copies of human geniuses), and within certain limits, so will the speed (insofar as we are still quite far from the theoretical limit of the speed at which current AI models could be executed, just using existing technology).
I always got the sense that LW was, and the AI alignment movement continues to be, stuck with the idealistic memeplex that '70s economics and classical AI had about the nature of intelligence and reasoning. The sense is that uncertainty and resource limitations are surely just a temporary hindrance that will disappear in the limit and can therefore simply be abstracted away, so you can get an adequate intuition for the dynamics of the "competing intelligences" game by looking at results like Aumann agreement.
It's not at all clear that this is the case; the load to model the actions of a 0.1% dumber competitor, or even just the consequences of the sort of mistakes a superintelligence could make in its superintelligent musings (to a sufficient degree of confidence to satisfy its superhuman risk aversion), may well outscale the advantages of being 0.1% more intelligent (whatever the linear measure of intelligence there is), to the point where there is nothing like a stable equilibrium that has the intellectually rich getting richer. Instead, as you are ahead, you have more to lose, and your 0.1% advantage does not protect you against serendipity or collusion or the possibility that one of those narrowly behind you gets lucky and pulls ahead, or simply exploits the concavity of your value functions to pull a "suicide bombing" on you, in the end forcing you to actually negotiate an artificial deadlock and uplift competitors that fall behind. Compare other examples of resource possession where in a naive model the resource seems like it would be reinvestable to obtain more of the same resource - why did the US not go FOOM among nations, or Bill Gates go FOOM among humans?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
26d ago
The $variables, I think, come from PHP (which used to occupy approximately the role that Javascript does now as the lingua franca of amateurs making things that run on the internet), with acceptance being helped along by their older use in Perl (though it is manifestly not Perl: you never see @thing, %thing etc.).
The Jargon File is trying to be this, but thanks to the biases of its shepherd(s) it generally underrepresents anything from cultures that do not have a direct lineage from oldschool Unix hackers.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
27d ago
If I were only taking seriously people who benefit from moderation, I'd put more weight on your objections
The logic there does not check out - the latter would follow if the insinuation were they you take all people who benefit from moderation seriously, not that you only take people who benefit from moderation seriously (= do not take people who don't benefit from moderation seriously). Anyway, I think that not being moderated oneself is a pretty low bar for "benefitting from moderation", coming across as somewhat alike in flavour to a tinpot dictator saying that all the people on the streets should just be grateful they have not been imprisoned yet. All that happened is that I had the sense to avoid fights with people who are evidently moderator darlings. Certain individuals getting lots of leeway for things including general culture-war obnoxiousness and even personal attacks, while any attempt at proportional defense is punished harshly, is in fact the primary way that moderator bias here manifests itself - and, of course, you don't generally mod people for attacking you, which makes it easier to suspend disbelief and maintain narrative that you are actually quite even-handed.
Now if WC speaks up and says "No, actually, I did wonder if @Belisarius was into cuckolding" - well, I'll own to granting him too much charity (and give him a warning not to do that again).
Do you not realise how absurd this sounds as an argument for your impartiality? "Well, of course if he were to step up and outright admit guilt in this specific fashion, I would have no choice but to punish him (that is, give him a stern warning)"
I mod people I like all the time, often with great regret.
I can't say I have seen any clear examples of that. In fact, I had you pegged as a clear instance of the "For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law" sort of authority.
I know the history of "cuck" as a right-wing slur, and maybe you should consider that the word triggered a disproportionate response from you when @WhiningCoil was using it in a more literal sense (and talking about the historical figure Belisarius, not the poster @Belisarius).
My response was triggered by your post, not WC's. If I had seen that post on its own, I would have mostly likely dismissed it as typical 2025-motte low-quality posting (maybe, if I were in a particularly futility-seeking mood, I'd have reported it as a low-effort post, expecting nothing). The thing that set me off is that the recipient, who evidently did take it as an attack (perfectly reasonably!), responded in a level-headed manner that could even be taken as defusing if the previous post was in fact meant as a personal attack, only to earn a modhat comment from the moderator that I had already previously taken note of for doing the "rules will be applied to people I dislike when they have slightly heated arguments with people I like" thing before. I knew very little about the exact political position of the two users (I figured they were both somewhere on the right), but given how much more prolific WhiningCoil is, it seemed plausible enough that this was yet another instance.
All of this could have been avoided if you didn't think it is a good idea to exempt users "in good standing" from the rules as written - even if you want to have the charity to consider it a joke, aren't jokes that are plausibly taken as personal attacks among the things that "Make your point reasonably clear and plain." is supposed to guard against?
I think you're a bad faith objector whose objections are purely tribal
Does the objection here break along tribal lines somehow? I couldn't tell who of the two is more "right-wing" for sure. At most, my sense is that WhiningCoil is more of a prolific and popular user that I figure you like, and my objections are "tribal" insofar as "users that Amadan likes" constitute a tribe. In that case, though, any objection against favouritism is definitionally tribal, and in your concept space, the only people who can have "good faith" objections to moderator bias are those who benefit from it. Maybe you think that is right and well, but then I can only say it is unfortunate if it turns out you only favour users who lack the principles to protest favouritism they benefit from.
(Though maybe you think that not finding a beloved right-wing slur intrinsically funny is already sufficient evidence of bias against the Right that rises to the level of bad faith...?)
To be fair, I should say I do appreciate that you explained your reasoning here. It does help me understand why you arrived at that decision, though I still think that the optics of it are terrible and it betrays an extreme double standard that you can muster the level of charity to interpret WhiningCoil's post, which really does not read as anything other than a wanton drive-by attack to me, as an innocuous "bit of jocularity" while also the level of anti-charity to interpret Belisarius's really rather level-headed response as "antagonistic".
I would expect this quality of moderation from 4chan, not TheMotte.
Of course you know I have had a beef with your partiality and believe that you treat users and tribes you are sympathetic to favourably, but this is an entirely new level of tendentiousness. User A makes an off-topic post trying to relate User B's username to a common slur/fixation, User B responds in a mildly standoffish manner but actually clarifies the origin of the username, and User B - only User B - gets a modhat reprimand? Of course, I fully expect that any objections will be met with the same old "I disagree, and no, I am not going to justify anything" sort of response from you. Is that what it is going to be, or do you have something better to offer?
(I don't even understand what you find so funny. Is it just "haha bro just called him a cuck"?)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
28d ago
Driving cars is among the later capabilities you'd expect to fall, if you switch off human conceit and take the far view. You're asking to beat billions of years of evolution in a data-poor domain (navigating the real world) rather than some thousands (written) or at most hundreds of thousands (spoken) in a well-databased one (words and symbolic reasoning).
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
28d ago
The state of children transitioners is in my not so charitable opinion a giant Munchausen by proxy from the mothers being enabled by society.
How do you square this with the erstwhile right-wing complaint that schools will encourage kids to transition while keeping it secret from their parents?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
30d ago
Can you think of some examples of people you like believing false things that would support your political beliefs if they were true, or is this purely an outgroup affliction in your eyes?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1mo ago
Not OP, but in my view the least enforced ones are "don't wage the culture war" (typical violation: "how do we best organise to end immigration?"), "write like everyone should be included" (typical violation: "$outgroup behaviour is a disgusting perversion and I am tired of pretending otherwise") and the one against "boo outgroup" posting.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1mo ago
I'm a fairly active reporter, only a small percentage of things I report get acted on, and the exchanges when I complained in the open that no action was taken were maybe about 50/50 between very late responses insinuating that it was unreasonable to expect action to be taken quickly, and dismissals with either no particularly coherent reason given or some form of messenger-shooting ("we get lots of people wanting their outgroup to be moderated more").
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1mo ago
Do we? One of the reasons immigration has been so controversial is by being openly a way for the Left to rig politics by importing paid-up foot soldiers.
At the object level, the person this thread is talking about is Asian-American, a demographic that is hardly solidly left.
I think that first-generation immigrants are essentially guests and should refrain from any public criticism of their host - a policy that I follow myself.
If you are invited to the home of a kid (to be clear, in this metaphor, this is the university community) who has an ongoing conflict with their parents, and the kid brings up the topic, do you side with the kid, the parents, or do you try to awkwardly stay neutral saying it's not your place to meddle?
If you are invited to the home of an adult with roommates (with a jointly held lease) who has an ongoing conflict with their other roommates (say, the majority of them), [same question]?
(Up to you to decide which one of these is a closer model of the situation at hand, though the choice would also reveal something about your understanding of nations.)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1mo ago
Well, I mean, the implied problem is that only foreigners who have the wrong kind of politics as far as the administration in power is concerned will run into trouble - so as long as you admit international students at all, under this principle, they become a way to bolster the numbers of the pro-government camp on American campuses. Due to the nature of the "marketplace of ideas" at university, this is bound to have adverse effects on the political expression even of native students who happen to oppose the government line.
(On the other hand, if international students are actually all forced to be completely apolitical, this may not make people happy either - I remember hearing complaints about Chinese MA students on this basis from both tribes during my US grad school period)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1mo ago
Would this argument also work to defend a hypothetical instance of a Democratic administration revoking the visa of pro-Trump (and hence, in particular, in favour of Trump's current Ukraine/Russia policy) students?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1mo ago
This attitude is not exclusive to America. Brexit is probably a more notorious example: poor Britons who voted Leave correctly identified that their government considered their job not governance but selling them decisions made in Brussels. In their ignorance and naivete, they expected their own government to pick up the slack after leaving and believed they could do a better job of it by themselves. The reality is this: a government used to outsourcing their decision making process and shirking responsibility cannot be expected to suddenly pick up that responsibility when it is placed upon their shoulders.
Why do you figure it is this way around, as opposed to Brussels just being a fig leaf that would let politicians point and say "we had no choice, it was ordained from above" for unpopular policies that they themselves actually wanted all along?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1mo ago
I get the sense that going too far into this direction may actually turn out to be counterproductive for that goal, though - unlike in the case of the drunk friend, there is no doubt in the case of the Trump administration who ultimately was at the wheel during the "cruel texts", and so for some future Newsom or Buttigieg admin, any loss of credibility would have to factor through the perception that they could be followed by a Vance or Trump Jr. administration that would renege on its predecessors' promises all over again. But the more exceptional Trump's actions wind up being perceived as, the more credible a Newsom/Buttigieg assertion that this was a one-off and appropriate precautions have been taken to not allow a repeat will be, especially if Trump keeps pushing the envelope and winds up being repudiated/defanged/experience a mysterious heart attack/successfully impeached.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1mo ago
I wonder if the Staten Island boat graveyard still is a thing, if that sort of thing is your thing.
So why do you figure are even cities like Kharkiv, which are in glide bomb range, still habitable and only minimally damaged? Why are Ukrainian civilian casualties still many times lower than those in, say, Gaza, despite the much greater scale of the conflict? Why are other dams on the Dnipro still standing, and why do you figure Russia would feel the need to "muddy the waters" if they don't actually care about the perception of the Western public?
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