roystgnr
1d ago
know for sure that your government will turn into Nazi Germany within a few years
I'm glad you're trying to steelman it, but isn't this a great counter-example to the "we don't need self-defense until it's almost too late" philosophy? Maybe 100k Jews got out of Germany to avoid the Nazis (peak Jewish-German population was in 1910, so many were surely leaving for other reasons too), and roughly another 350k got out after the Nazis took over but before they made emigration illegal and really started in on the mass murder of the remaining 150k ... but that didn't make as much difference as you'd think in the end, because the biggest single source of Holocaust deaths wasn't the victims who had failed to escape Nazi Germany, it was the 20 times as many Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. When Poland was invaded it had still been trying to negotiate a day before and it was conquered a month afterward. If you're only ready to defend yourself against corrupt establishments that give you a few years' warning then their natural countermove is to just not give you that much warning.
roystgnr
1d ago
No spoiler tags? I know, I know, decades-old books, but you never know who's never read them but might like to.
I'd also say the Minds are godlike in the ancient "squabbling Greek pantheon" sense rather than the modern "omniscient + omnipotent" sense; they surely count as superintelligent, but e.g.
roystgnr
1d ago
There were a very wide range of intelligence levels in Asimov's stories, even just restricting to his main series' "canon" stories. Many of his stories set "early" in his fictional future are basically puzzle stories where positronic robots are doing something stupid and humans are trying to understand why. Even in his "later" settings it was just the personal-servant style robots who had roughly human-level intelligence, and those were outnumbered by humanoid-but-dullard robots limited to agriculture or manufacturing uses.
More spoilery:
roystgnr
1d ago
They had to invest a disproportionate amount of time double-checking the AI output
There's definitely no "general" AI these days that doesn't need careful double-checking.
and would have been better off doing without.
But this doesn't follow. I don't use AI for my job yet, but at least for independent research it often makes a much better search engine than a search engine. The results are full of as much nonsense as reality, but that's often true of search engine results too. Weeding out the nonsense is generally much faster than fighting to find exactly the right search terms, especially when the problem is related to a field of math where the search terms include words like "normal" that have been overloaded ten different ways.
It's kind of like having an intern, but instead of handing them a tedious task and expecting to have to double-check the results with a fine-toothed comb a day later, you get the results and have to get out of the comb a moment later. With an intern there's an investment aspect (they're learning fast from us and that'll make some of them better permanent hires in the future) that conversing with an AI lacks, but despite that AI is currently improving faster than a typical intern learns IMHO. Over the last year or two the top commercial LLM performance on my favorite "benchmark" grad-school-level applied math question has gone from "making basic sign errors on the easiest part of their answer and then arguing about them or making other errors when they're pointed out" to "missing a subtle inconsistency in the hardest part of their answer and then correcting it when it's pointed out".
roystgnr
2d ago
Imagine every time you started or ended a relationship, you had to establish every social norm from scratch.
Does this not describe modern (at least post-Sexual-Revolution) monogamous dating as well? Communication styles, division of labor, etc. are all a mess of uprooted and jumbled expectations about huge issues, but just consider sex first. We live in a world where some people think fornication is a sin, others think you can sleep around with anyone you date until you officially have The Talk with one of them, and there's a big confused middle where a little promiscuity is fine but too much is sickening and people disagree about what kinds or quantities of sex cross the line. (link to 1994 movie clip, because it's not like this is a really new problem either)
some were actual female nerds who despised male nerds for whatever reason (probably mostly the same reasons non-nerd women do)
Were they? There are some male nerds who are even despised by other male nerds, but it's almost a tautology that the "Star Trek posters in the workplace are Not Inclusive and Not Okay" sorts of woke blather were coming from non-nerds; actual female nerds were more likely to be Star Trek fanfic (or actual Star Trek novel, for that matter) writers. There are many male nerds who are basically perceived as romantically undesirable by most female nerds, as in the old "the odds are good but the goods are odd" joke in so many gender-lopsided environments, but there's a big difference between being unloved and being despised (although I'm sure that difference feels academic to the chronically unloved).
Consider the crime of Landing On a Comet While Wearing The Wrong Nerdy Shirt: there's a reason why it took a fashion writer out of her depth to call the guy out, despite both his boss and the creator of the shirt being women.
roystgnr
7d ago
Not even "giant" by some standards - the calculations I've seen say approximately 1 gigawatt for an adequately sized electromagnetic shield. Putting a reactor that big in space would be a literally massive undertaking, but not relative to the value of shielding an entire planet, and once the reactor is up there it'd only be a couple dozen tons per year of uranium to refuel it.
roystgnr
7d ago
reject the axiom of choice
I get your point, but this is a bad example - the reason (AC) is an axiom and not a theorem is because you can reject it and still have a self-consistent system of mathematics at the end. There's stuff you can't prove without it, but there's much more you can still do without it, and also proving exactly which theorems do or don't depend on it is sometimes an interesting contribution to mathematics in itself. That's probably a politically acceptable category of contribution, too, despite flirting with (AC), if the results are phrased like "Look what foolish falsehoods the imperialist oppressors could have tricked you into if not for Dear Leader's wisdom that Choice Is A Lie!"
Rejecting an actual theorem in this fashion would be a disaster. The Principle of Explosion is bad enough that I wouldn't be surprised to see mathematicians deciding that they'd rather go out in full Kaczynski style with non-metaphorical explosions.
I think the important thing for avoiding political targeting of a field's theories isn't whether the field is "pure", but whether its complex-to-apply theories lead to simple-to-verify results. Math often does this, with problems whose solutions require advanced math to find but only basic math to check, but really much-less-pure engineering is the king here. Eventually either a nuke goes boom or it doesn't; either a rocket goes up or it doesn't. Being good at engineering rockets eventually got Korolev a reprieve from the Gulag, whereas being a perfect historian or economist would have probably made his fate worse.
roystgnr
7d ago
Apparently they cut some kind of dog cancer research program that my mom always thought was dumb
I know this is only a side note to your main point, but could you explain why?
We're getting better about allowing terminally-ill patients access to experimental treatments, but even in a libertarian utopia there's always going to be a lot of cases where you'd like to learn faster via experiment but where you have a tough time getting volunteers - e.g. with cancers these days there's typically a non-experimental treatment that's not ideal but that's good enough to not leave people desperate for a still-in-testing alternative. Plus, with any research of medical conditions which are linked to aging there's always going to be some benefit to being able to do studies with a population that ages five times as fast.
On the other hand, I could see an argument that dogs specifically are pointless here - start research in mice where you get even faster aging and less ethical concern over their deaths, finish (the animal testing phase of) research in monkeys or apes when you need closer relatives to humans, and then maybe you want to just skip right over dogs.
roystgnr
9d ago
What is the meaningful distinction between "this simulation was set up according to deterministic laws and then allowed to run for a trillion years to generate the current state" versus "this simulation instantiated the current state by simulating a trillion years of deterministic evolution in two seconds"?
In general? Hard to say; possibly none. But I'd also think both would fit pretty well into the "developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process" category, especially if the answer is "none". If there's no distinction between a Creator spending millions of years of time on hominids versus a Creator spending millions of years of simulation-time on hominids, and if the former would clearly qualify for that poll response, then Q.E.D.
In a philosophy where there is a duality between brains which obey material laws and immortal souls which are above them, though, wouldn't the simulation case be weird? The hundreds of thousands of people who just started existing mid-adulthood have a full life's worth of memories of things that never happened? If you're facing away from your kid when you start existing, you feel love for someone you've never really met?
Regardless, although I love a Simulationist thought experiment as much as the next nerd, but the "in their present form" answerers are probably not picturing a Great Programmer here, and when you get into specifics then there are meaningful distinctions. The deterministic-laws-running case led to a state where, by 8000BC, large human subpopulations were on every continent; the in-their-present-form case, to about half of people who answered that, the story of a single pair of humans molded from the dust of the ground in the Garden of Eden is literally true.
I admit I'm surprised that fraction isn't higher. 20% of Americans are people who, despite thinking that there's a bunch of non-literal stuff in the Bible (presumably more than just the stories explicitly defined as parables), don't think the non-literal parts might include the bit about humanity being 6000ish years old?
The converse situation is even weirder, though. 6% of Americans don't identify as Christians and yet think the Christian Bible is "the actual word of God, to be taken literally"? Are they old-fashioned (mythical?) Satanists who believe in God but don't worship him? Are they Gnostics who think the Biblical God is real but is actually not the Supreme Being? I'm not aware of a ton of other options here. Maybe I just expect too much consistency from polling results in general.
roystgnr
9d ago
Wouldn't their alternative option of "Humans have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process" have been a better fit for your position?
roystgnr
9d ago
Humans don't even want political opinions that differ greatly from ours to exist. In a democracy those opinions might spread to the median voter and then be imposed on us against our will, and even in an oligarchy or autocracy there's always the chance that they will persuade the leaders or inspire a revolt against the leaders and then be imposed on us against our will. The use of language to navigate intratribal factionalism is probably older than homo sapiens. It's really hard to treat a question dispassionately as an intellectual issue, rather than as a signifier of loyalties, when everything we think and feel screams that there might be too much at stake.
Consider LessWrong, possibly the most concentrated population of high-functioning autists intelligent high-decoupling people on the internet, people deliberately trying to learn how to better discuss issues rationally in an unbiased fashion, the sort of "hey, I see what the problem is" people that normies joke about: their main conclusion about politics was that anybody who wanted to apply their intellect to any other issue should talk about politics as little as possible in the process.
If you want to apply your intellect to politics, though, where do you go? Well, here I am, I guess? I wish the place was more popular among thoughtful left-wing participants, and maybe there's some way to improve that, but in the meantime I'd rather be somewhere that often repels people with opposing views than somewhere that often expels them.
I think a more subtle issue (though I hesitate to call it a problem) here is that we also select for a particular subset of right-wing participants. Obviously anyone who's a Witch on one issue or another has reason to come to a place like this they won't be expelled from, but also there's a bit of strain between @Goodguy's claims of "assume that social conservatism is correct" and "wordily show-offy". At least 5 years ago, the modal Motte survey respondant was "ambivalent about religion, seeing it as a weak force for good", but that's reflective of a very peculiarly modern type of "conservative". At least in the US (also a modal Motte user characteristic in that survey), the modal social conservative is instead one of the 40% of Americans who would agree that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so". I know there are a number of faithful theists here, but in all the random discussions I've seen of anthropology and human genetics and so on I've never seen anyone jump in with the "no, it wasn't a parable, the first humans were created from clay 6kya" rebuttal that's a plurality belief among Americans. I'm not really interested in rehashing (from my perspective) that debate, but I hope that people are here who would be on the other side and are simply avoiding bringing it up for similar reasons, because that's still a huge and politically important mass of people, whom we can't avoid talking about, and whom I'd therefore like to occasionally be talking to.
roystgnr
9d ago
since the dawn of civilization
Ownership greatly predates humanity, much less civilization. Stick a bunch of GPS collars on wolves and you can see which territory each pack "owns". Establishing a Schelling point of "this is ours, that is theirs" is what naturally evolves to reduce negative-sum conflicts over rivalrous goods as soon as you have a species whose minds can handle such a distinction, which is much earlier than you get a species whose minds can handle (much less invent - Schelling was writing less than a century ago!) the underlying game theory.
If anything, civilization started out with a step backwards in the conception of ownership. The early "palace economy" city-states, where you gave your production to the ruler(s) and hopefully enough of it was eventually doled back out to you, are much more accurately described as a way to "Usurp rights over resources ... by fiat and, if necessary, by fraud and/or force" than anything capitalists typically do. It took a very long time before the study of economics (famously named "the dismal science" in a pro-slavery screed, because it "finds the secret of this Universe in 'supply and demand', and reducing the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone") managed to successfully convince most economists that individual ownership can be more fruitful than collective ownership, not just more moral, and I'm afraid it still hasn't managed to become convincing to most non-economists.
paranoid who don't understand the concept of sharing
The above wiki link is one place to look to see why this is positively wrong, but here it's normatively wrong as well.
roystgnr
9d ago
This description of Capitalism applies to middle-men (e.g. quant traders, supermarkets, etc)
It doesn't even apply to them. The middle-men legitimately obtain their goods, typically from central examples of businesses, they add value to the goods by moving them to a point in space and/or retaining them until a point in time and/or combining them into a context where they're more valuable, and they retain some of that value for themselves while passing some on to their suppliers and customers. Buying from a supermarket at a markup is a much better deal than trying to buy the same quantities of the same groceries direct from the supermarket's suppliers.
roystgnr
9d ago
So an arm of the revolutionary government and its precursors. State.
Proto-state, sure, with the benefit of hindsight. The actual State at the time was the government they fought against for 8 years, who wasn't their sponsor.
roystgnr
10d ago
Adams and Jefferson would PRESUME any org engaging in all that sort of commerce must be sponsored by some government, otherwise the other governments would crush them.
Adams defended John Hancock in court after the latter's smuggling business was caught out. The big deal in smuggling back then was just getting wine and tea without paying taxes on them, but that was enough that it helped fund and train colonists for and prompt the American Revolution.
Jefferson fought the first of the Barbary Wars, against foes who were nominally Ottoman protectorates but really independent warlords funded by human trafficking, extortion, and piracy.
Explain to them that we now have drugs so destructive that we ban their shipment at any price and yet so addictive that their market is over $10B/year, and I think they'd understand right away that those drugs' smugglers would avoid becoming a legible (and thus easily targetable) government but would still become powerful enough to stand up to weak governments anyway.
"this Venezuela is a lawless land of pirates then?" We hang pirates, or sink them, of course. "
This was Jefferson's thinking going into the First Barbary War, despite that being evenly matched enough that we have to call it the "First" and we didn't get a complete victory until a decade later. Pitting the modern US vs Venzuela would seem to be a much more obvious and less bold decision.
I'm not sure that works as a metaphor here, though. That "avoid becoming a legible government" trick in the modern case is a sneaky one. If we can't stop Tren de Aragua from operating here in the US under our noses, why be surprised or angry with Venezuela about the fact that they also can't stop it there? But if we can, then from our point of view the problem is solved here, no need to go nation-building to try to solve it elsewhere.
roystgnr
14d ago
We had a civil war back when "States" actually meant "independently governed polities", not "administrative prefectures of the single government", and people were pretty loyal to their states, and so despite some exceptions like West Virginia, the "War Between the States" was actually a war between (collections of) states. The front line was a mostly well-defined, somewhat-stable thing.
The most exceptional change to the geometry of the combat was probably Sherman's march to the sea, and it's not a coincidence that that's the main US Civil War example on Wikipedia's Scorched Earth page. If you're in a position where you have a locally small value of territory occupied relative to the length of frontage needed to defend it, then you don't want to sit on it and defend it. The best thing you can do defensively is to keep maneuvering until you're somewhere less dangerous, and the best thing you can do offensively is reduce the value of territory you maneuver through before the enemy takes it back. Scorch the earth.
What would the front line look like in a US Civil War II? Something roughly like the old maps of the "Hillary Archipelago" and "Trump's Ocean", to begin with. And that looks like an astonishingly high ratio of boundary to territory, doesn't it? That's not going to be what a somewhat-stable front line looks like. That's what the battle lines of a guerrilla war look like. If the war goes on a long time, those fractal boundaries are going to change into something more connected, and a lot of people in both the red areas being seized for connections and the blue areas that are too isolated to connect are going to be unhappy about the process.
For that matter, a lot of people in the "red" (actually reddish-purple) and "blue" (actually bluish-purple) areas aren't going to be happy no matter what happens. Being so ideologically divided in a way that's so geographically diffuse makes it less likely for another civil war to happen, but also makes the consequences if one does happen much more dire.
roystgnr
16d ago
Palace coups are not civil wars.
The Great Purge featured several hundred thousand executions, plus more deaths in the gulags. Maybe that's not a Civil War, it's just sparkling mass homicide, but either way it's really not a great choice of ally.
roystgnr
16d ago
the russian communists did not fight civil wars among each other
They hunted Trotsky all the way to Mexico to assassinate him, in between their massive internal purges. Out of the first Politburo, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, Bubnov Kamenev and Zinoviev executed, and Sokolnikov assassinated in a Soviet prison. Lenin and (unless you believe the Beria-assassination theory) Stalin were the only two of those seven not to be killed by other Russian Communists.
and neither did they fight with the chinese after those left
A few hundred dead here and there wasn't much of a fight in the end, but it did risk going nuclear before tensions cooled. Relying on Richard Nixon's firm hand and cool head to avert thermonuclear armageddon is like the final stage of international desperation, if not outright evidence for ongoing Anthropic-Principle effects; it is not a desirable or peaceful relationship.
roystgnr
16d ago
German communism was on good terms with and supported by Russia generally. The less-authoritarian socialists who were critical would face the wall anyway.
This isn't why they wouldn't feud, it's why they would feud. Communism did indeed turn out to be one of those systems where the people who got into power were the ones ruthless enough to murder the idealists who might object to ruthlessness ... and ideas like "we should stay on good terms with those foreigners" and "we should support those foreigners", if held as terminal values rather than just means to an end, are just another form of idealism. If your leaders are all selected by a process that winnows out the ones foolish enough to not betray their competition before they can be betrayed by them, or even if you just suspect that the other guys' leaders were selected by such a process, your only non-idealistic option is to try to maneuver yourself into a good position to strike first yet again, before they succeed at doing the same. It takes ambition to climb to the top of an authoritarian pyramid, and ambitious authoritarians can only safely collaborate with underlings who are too humble to worry about or rulers who are too strong to challenge, not with other ambitious authoritarians.
I often hammer on FDR and FDR apologetics, but to be fair I do think there's a reasonable argument that can be made that some fraction of the wrecking ball he took to United States and classical-liberal values was actually necessary to avoid even worse. In an atmosphere of uncertainty and panic spawning significant socialist and fascist movements, perhaps the only escape was to adopt some of their less-murderous tenets so that the more-murderous movements could no longer use those to appeal to the populace and win with the whole package. And although it dismays me that FDR was and still remains so popular, the knowledge that his values won out through popularity rather than through war or murder means we never got stuck in that same cycle where nobody can imagine any way out except more war and murder.
roystgnr
17d ago
Not recently, but I do get sudden changes in 'For You' content every few months, and past changes have occasionally been "more fluff" or "more viral garbage" or something along those lines. Usually a dozen clicks on "Not interested in this post", plus a few "Show fewer posts from ClickBait123" on top of that, is enough to fix the problem ... at least for another few months until the algorithm gets tweaked again.
roystgnr
21d ago
The Comanche Wars article will helpfully add for context the fact that "they also shared parts of Comancheria with the Wichita, Kiowa, and Kiowa Apache" (for some value of "shared"...), and explains that those wars were because "The value of the Comanche traditional homeland was recognized by European-American colonists". They do say that the wars "began in 1706 with raids by Comanche warriors on the Spanish colonies of New Spain", but you have to find the article specifically about the Shoshone to learn that "Some of them moved as far south as Texas, emerging as the Comanche by 1700."
I still don't get why pushing for the moral legitimacy of the Comanche conquests is a thing. I'd think the idea of a "traditional homeland" should have deeper connotations than "we conquered your neighbors more than six years before we tried to conquer you too!"
roystgnr
22d ago
The body count was about 2400, about half the personnel count of a modern US carrier. They were provoked by crippling embargos, albeit well-deserved ones. Hawaii was still a territory, and wouldn't be a state for nearly two more decades. If the Japanese had killed 2300 soldiers and sailors in a sneak attack before declaring war but hadn't killed 68 civilians, then yes, the reaction would have been roughly the same.
China doesn't want japan, if they want korea they just have to wait, so the only possible hot war is over taiwan.
No real arguments with any of this, though. I suppose there's also the "Thucydides Trap" possibility where the US becomes so unnerved by China's rising power that we provoke a war; that theory doesn't sound quite as silly as it used to.
roystgnr
22d ago
also it features the wearing of trenchcoats and indoor sunglasses at night
It's hard to tell because of the graphics tech, but JC's and Paul Denton's eyes are supposed to be unnaturally (luminescently?) blue as a side-effect of their augmentations, not just an ordinary blue. The sunglasses aren't to keep moonlight out, they're to keep JC from looking inhumanly creepy when he interacts with the public. There's an in-game text about a similar problem with the "Men in Black" agents: "... we are still continuing our attempts to isolate the source of the albino traits present ever since the Series L, but so far the simple addition of sunglasses and dark clothing appear to have resolved the matter in a practical fashion..."
The trenchcoats are just because trenchcoats look cool.
There's a little bit of esoteric Mormonism hidden from members, but the trick is that the hiding spot isn't "underground", it's "the past". E.g. run-of-the-mill members of the church mostly eventually get to see the (officially-)secret present-day temple ceremonies, but their only access to previous ceremony versions is via the same "look at leaked copies or recordings" (or a wiki summary?) method as any member of the general public.
Well, the hiding spot is "the past" for most members, at least. I'd presume that at some level non-run-of-the-mill members get to see official records of previous ceremony versions, but that's just me trying to be charitable, because alternatives like "the Prophet isn't supposed to see all his church's past" or "he's just supposed to trust Wikipedia if he gets curious" would seem worse.
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