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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30732 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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So Ed West has a good piece up on immigration. He's British, so naturally he will focus on the British angle but I think his main takeaways have wider applicability across the West. His argument is that so-called "experts" have consistently underestimated the potential for mass migration for decades. Ed makes the case that given a confluence of factors (established migrant communities, English being the lingua franca, a whole apparatus of NGOs/judicial activists and a very pro-immigration media envionrment), we're likely to see a continued rise in immigration unless there is a drastic shift in policies.

For my part, I think any serious restriction is out the window. That ship has basically sailed for the West. Trump did what he could but was sabotaged by the courts and political insiders at every step. So instead of trying to prevent what is essentially the inevitable, better ask what our future look like.

American social scientist Garrett Jones has written an important new book which argues that new research suggests that assimilation is fact very rare and cultural patterns persist for decades, perhaps even centuries. Even if we were to restrict ourselves to white immigration, how many of the Catholic and East European immigrants who came to the US during the 1870-1924 period truly assimilated into the Anglo-Saxon ethos of limited government? Was JFK's and FDR's winning coalitions not in small part due to these new immigrants?

Jones makes the case that even attitudes like propensity to save or social trust are passed down through generations. This would suggest that the future of the West is a hyper-unequal and low-trust society. Perhaps we are already well on our way. Politically, it could paradoxically help the right since to enact a leftist agenda on economics you need a cross-racial coalition among the working class and this seems to be unlikely if you cannot have assimilation across population groups even after decades, as Jones suggests.

we're likely to see a continued rise in immigration unless there is a drastic shift in policies.

For my part, I think any serious restriction is out the window. That ship has basically sailed for the West. Trump did what he could but was sabotaged by the courts and political insiders at every step. So instead of trying to prevent what is essentially the inevitable, better ask what our future look like.

Agree. I don't see any reason for this to change. Both sides benefit from immigration ,either more votes or more consumers, cheaper labor, etc. It does not even have a be a serious restriction, just any attempt seems doomed to fail.

American social scientist Garrett Jones has written an important new book which argues that new research suggests that assimilation is fact very rare and cultural patterns persist for decades, perhaps even centuries.

I think this is wrong. 2nd, 3rd gen Irish, German, Hispanic, etc. immigrants seem pretty assimilated. Irish and Italian Americans used to be reliably blue, but now much more red. They may not be assimilated in the sense of caring about the hagiography of the founding US, but they are assimilated in terms of culture.

It might be a good idea to post this in the new thread tomorrow.

Britain's economy has been unusually poorly performing, primarily due to all this migration IMO. There's no need to mechanize if labor is cheap. Why bother raising wages if there's another 100K arriving this quarter? Though there are also issues with planning laws and endless delays/community consultation.

Migration now is peanuts compared to what's coming when climate change starts really hitting Sub-Saharan Africa. They're one of the only remaining regions with high population growth. Africa is supposed to hit 2.4 billion by 2050, much of that will be in the least developed parts. There's little water, few jobs and already considerable political dysfunction.

If Europe does not adopt an Australian-style migration policy, they'll experience serious problems. There's a fairly high cap for skilled immigration. However, Australia had a policy that no asylum seekers who arrived by boat would be resettled in the country, regardless of whether they were legitimate or not. They get sent to Nauru for processing. At best they'd get to be resettled in Papua New Guinea, an unappealing prospect. Boats that came to Australia would often be turned back to the port of origin. Europe has more naval power/km of coastline than Australia. They have the power to turn back the boats, it is only a matter of will. The EU is very troublesome here, human rights lawyers are mostly ignored in Australia but hold power in the EU. There appear to be various NGOs who shuttle refugees across the Mediterranean, these could be broken up.

/images/1669589440237527.webp

There's no need to mechanize if labor is cheap

Isn't this disproven by China, which had a lot of cheap labor but 'mechanized' - or any country that's gone from poor agriculture to first world?

And for explaining the economy - a very quick google claimed 'There were a record 44.8 million immigrants living in the U.S. in 2018, making up 13.7% of the nation's population', while 'Last year 16.8% of people in England and Wales had been born outside Britain, up from 13.4 in 2011'. Those are quite close, so that can't be it. Comparing in europe - "As of 2019, around 13.7 million people living in Germany, or about 17% of the population, are first-generation immigrants", despite a gdp/capita higher than the UK.

It's funny how 'there is a broad correlation between X and Y across countries' can't prove 'X causes Y', but 'there isn't a broad correlation across countries' serves as evidence here against 'X causes Y'. But it's fine because - I'm not using this to claim 'therefore, immigration doesn't hurt economies' - just claiming that 'britain's claimed economic underperformance can't be caused by more immigration in a simple sense'. i.e. - yeah, maybe most higher-immigration countries have some factor Z that improves the economy that correlates with immigration, so it 'looks like' Z and immigration don't affect the economy, but britain has immigration and no Z, so its economy is impacted. Even then, though, britain's "unusually" poorly performing economy, relative to the world, can't be caused by immigration - that'd be the difference in Z (or britain having a different kind of immigrants or something)

Add this to the fact that America has indeed stayed powerful and effective despite multiple waves of mass immigration. I think the idea that naturalization is rare and/or difficult needs to have extremely strong evidence behind it to be believed.

Naturalization and remaining powerful are two different things.

I hope Jones credited anechonicmedia for that insight.

He(?)'s the only person I've seen doing the actual math on it with General Social Survey data though. Is that the same way Jones supports his argument?

Trump did what he could but was sabotaged by the courts and political insiders at every step.

It's the job of Congress to set immigration policy, not the President. The focus on the President as the end-all of the American government is understandable but misplaced. Congress is a large body and it's difficult to assign individual responsibility to particular legislators so its gets kind of diffused out. But for better or worse, they are in a far stronger position to steer the ship of state than the President.

In any event, looking at the tally it seems fairly clear that this policy doesn't command anything close to a majority of the House even when it was GOP controlled.

It's the job of Congress to set immigration policy, not the President

And if Congress passes vague enabling acts empowering the President with immense discretion, then it becomes the President's job de facto.

Fair point. And indeed a lot of the INA is maddeningly non-specific.

At the very least, though, when the President does anything that can be defended under the statute (+Chevron deference), we ought to assign responsibility.

The whole thing is a vicious cycle. Congress' vague language enables massive discretion, the assignment of responsibility ("Obama did", "Trump did") fuels further for Congress to pass the buck.

If you read the actual immigration policy, as set by the Congress in the actual acts it passed, you’ll observe that Trump’s actions were very much in line with what the immigration laws actually are. For example, he made some moves to enforce the public charge rule, for the exact reasons this rule was passed into the law in the first place. His problem was not so much that he was blocked by the Congress, which passed different policy, but instead by judiciary and lawfare, which instituted policies contrary to what the Congress passed into law, and the Executive actually tried to enforce.

It would seem that Congress did not agree with your fiat that the public charge rule meant what Trump said it meant, or else it would have amended the statute to say so. Congress is more than capable of being precise when it suits them and conversely of being extremely vague when they'd rather pass the buck. And Trump could very well have asked for specific language to that effect but AFAICT he didn't make a specific push for it.

What I mean to get at here isn't the object level of any particular provision, but more broadly that the government is a huge ship and the best way to make policy change is to get both Congress and the President steering in the same direction at the same time.

In the US women are more likely to register for voting and have a higher turnout:

https://cawp.rutgers.edu/facts/voters/gender-differences-voter-turnout

It has been so since the 60s. For Presidential elections, it amounts to roughly 10 million more votes coming from women than men.

Why do you think it is the case?

Yes. My girlfriend has voted like five times in San Francisco this year. She complains they have too many elections there, but keeps voting anyway.

I haven't voted since 2008.

Probably many factors, but if we're in CW thread I'll notice if it were the other way, somebody would already have declared it a national crisis and got a big budget allocation for fixing it. I mean, almost 3% sexist gap! That's millions of people oppressed and disenfranchised!

Probably a mix of a big pile of factors:

-- Homeless people, whether in the true sleeping rough sense or the more vague no-fixed-abode sense, don't vote. The vast majority of homeless people are men (though felony disenfranchisement might take care of most of these anyway)

-- Felony disenfranchisement. Which is also pretty vaguely understood, probably a good number of misdemeanor convictions that guys think mean they can't vote. Given @ymeshkout's work on the topic, authorities themselves might not even be sure who can vote, so why risk it?

-- On a related note, men are more likely to have open warrants, unpaid fines, unpaid taxes, child support arrears, or other legal issues. Such men will frequently avoid all contact with "the system" assuming that something like voting would immediately get him reported to the cops who would come pick him up for his unpaid parking tickets or whatever.

-- Correlation vs causation is tough to gage, but educated people vote. More girls graduate high school and college.

-- Women are more involved in civic organizations, who in turn lead get out the vote efforts. Women are more likely to attend church, churches lead GOTV in many demographics

-- Women are more likely to have friends, who will keep in touch with them about voting. This is a huge part of how people get out to vote, I can say personally every Primary and General election I'm calling friends of mine to remind them.

-- Many stereotypically male professions, manufacturing or construction work for example, are jobs that would be difficult to duck out for a few hours to vote in the afternoon. Where female dominated office and retail jobs might make it easier to take a few hours off.

-- Men tend more towards extremes. Men are more likely to follow cockamamie ideologies, and more likely to whine that politics are dumb and doesn't affect anything anyway.

Maybe it is because men understand voting isn’t really individually useful?

Your vote will probably never change an election outcome (though, you never know - see Exeter in 1910 and some other examples), margins do matter. A bigger margin of victory will obviously embolden a candidate to be more aggressive in pursuing their policies, and vice versa, so your vote does make an (albeit very small) contribution in that respect.

I'm seeing vote difference in CO-3 district of about 550 votes. Given how close the House results are in general, this seat could (though it isn't now) plausibly be crucial for House majority. So 550 votes would change the course of national politics for at least 2 years. Sure, it's not individual vote, but it's not that far from it. There are even closer races, probably - I didn't check every one, I just noticed this one because Boebert is a figure of some prominence.

Yet 550 votes is not 1 vote.

I would suggest this preoccupation with what might be "individually useful" is symptomatic of the toxic femininity that has come to infect the whole of our intellectual class.

To quote George S. Patton...

An army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, and fights as a team. This individual hero stuff is bullshit. The bilious bastards who write that stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know any more about real battle than they do about fucking. And we have the best team—we have the finest food and equipment, the best spirit and the best men in the world. Why, by God, I actually pity these poor bastards we're going up against.

All the real heroes are not storybook combat fighters. Every single man in the army plays a vital role. So don't ever let up. Don't ever think that your job is unimportant. What if every truck driver decided that he didn't like the whine of the shells and turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? That cowardly bastard could say to himself, 'Hell, they won't miss me, just one man in thousands.' What if every man said that? Where in the hell would we be then? No, thank God, Americans don't say that. Every man does his job. Every man is important. The ordnance men are needed to supply the guns, the quartermaster is needed to bring up the food and clothes for us because where we are going there isn't a hell of a lot to steal. Every last damn man in the mess hall, even the one who boils the water to keep us from getting the GI shits, has a job to do.

This is a good point. The individually useful thing is the result of a kind of libertarian transactionalism that once learned is difficult to unlearn. You can posit a possibly naive but socially useful state of mind wrt politics before coming into contact with it.

But I'm too far gone now. I can't pretend like I didn't learn it.

There is a stereotype that men like to fix problems; women like to talk about problems. If that is true, voting seems to fall (from an individual perspective) more into the latter category instead of the former. A single man might focus his energy into something that can make a difference.

There is also in your Patton quote a bit of Marx’s alienation of labor. Sure, the cook has to abstract why what he does helps the unit. But at the same time he sees a tangible result (food is made). Voting is more abstract.

Agreed. In my earlier years I was interested in WW1 and especially WW2 eating all the autobiographies of fighter pilots and tankers from all sides. I made extra effort to watch every war movie that was on TV. And then my world was upended when I read Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe. His book was all about port capacity, supply line security and throughput and where to open fronts strategically or where to hamper German capacities all with tables and numbers. It really opened my eyes - no amount of heroism on any side could ever made the difference against such a well oiled machine. It did not matter if Germans had "better" tanks or jet fighters or even more experienced troops. They lost the moment US entered the war.

On a kind of related note, this is another thing I find funny about Paul Verhoeven's adaptation of Starship Troopers. Verhoeven famously didn't read the book and basically set out to to subvert what he saw as "some warmonger's manifesto" yet accidentally made a decent enough adaptation that Heinlein's core point about the importance of "doing one's part" even when it may be relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things remains readily legible.

I find it weird to invoke this idea about voting of all things. Old Blood and Guts wasn't exactly elected into the position.

No he wasn't but this is also one of those bits if inferential distance. "Old blood and guts" was "old blood and guts" because he acted in contravention to rationalist conceptions of power rather than accordance with. His degree of success exists as a sort of "fuck you" to the modern academic ethos which is why he is so despised by the modern academic. The grand Irony of course being that Patton was probably more of a "democrat" than any one currently in the democratic party. After all where does the power of an army lie if not in the rank and file? IE "the demos"

Adding my vote (haha!) to this one. Women are just more susceptible to propaganda in general, and this includes "YoUr VoTe MaTtErS!" propaganda.

'Your vote matters' isn't really intended to mean 'your vote might decide the next President/Mayor/legislator', it (at least in my mind) is intended to convey the point that the result of elections matters in more ways than deciding the winner. The more crushing the margin of the winner, the less they have to worry about winning over voters other than their core base, or alternatively the closer the margin the more they have to appease their less enthused voters and potential swing voters voted for someone else.

Now, of course, one vote won't make an enormous difference to the overall perception of the margin, but it is basically true that ever vote matters just a little bit even if you almost certainly won't change the winner. This is especially true because not just margin in isolation, but margin also gets significant attention paid to it. In the 1970 UK election, which saw Heath replace Wilson in No. 10, the average swing to the Conservatives was only about 4% - now some seats only had about 30,000 votes cast (many even fewer), which means that a pretty small number of voters could change the swing significantly.

Women tend to score higher on conscientiousness than men, and voting is a boring activity that requires planning and deferred gratification.

I know in my house, my husband’s mail-in ballot would never make it out the door without my prodding (even though I know his vote will undo mine).

As a note, women score about the same as men on conscientiousness, however men score more on subcategory of industriousness and women more on subcategory of orderliness: the tendency toward tidiness, routine and perfectionism. So your premise stands but with this caveat.

Where is the gratification? Voting seems like a cost without any real reward. It isn’t “defer a marshmallow today for two tomorrow.” Instead it’s defer a marshmallow today for nothing tomorrow.

Winning elections is the reward?

Probably more that 'watching the victory of the side you supported' is the reward.

If vicarious enjoyment of a win you personally did (almost) nothing to contribute to wasn't a thing, professional sports wouldn't be a trillion dollar industry.

Elections aren’t won by you voting; they are won by influencing a multitude of people to vote.

But if you vote, you become part of the "winning team". Voting is like going to watch your favourite sports team: you have almost no influence on the result, but you feel part of something.

Or the majority of the time they're determined by a relatively small population in swing seats

At a macro level I think the big thing is it would mean the democrats assumption they crush the popular vote is misleading.

And under the surface tough to sort thru because of felons and the heavy black proportion. But these non-voters I would guess are still heavy gop leans.

Politics today is about persuasive emotional messaging, which women are more receptive to.

This isn't a place for low effort comments and memeing. Don't do this.

Two ideas:

  1. The start of the mainstreaming of modern second-wave feminism was basically in the 60s. This perhaps demoralizes many (if not most) men and of course demoralized people vote less over time.

  2. As modern politics developed, voting became more often driven by social/moral/etc. panics (commonly of the "They're coming for [X]!" or "Think of the [children/women/oppressed minorities]!" variety, though of course variations of these take hold to some degree at times on both sides) and emotional/moralistic appeals, and naturally the more socially-attuned and emotionally-driven gender would be more vulnerable to them. (Though this effect likely works in both directions, with more women voters causing politics to trend in that direction just as much as they're more likely to turn out for it.)

There's over 20 million felons in the country, the vast majority of which are men, I'd imagine that's a big chunk of it.

I think this is the largest confounder.

Naively assuming that ~1/3 of all voting-aged people vote, And assuming that roughly everyone in prison is a man, this explains around 6 million of the missing votes. There are a lot more hidden variables but I'll leave that for the "social scientists".

Are felons less likely to vote demographically, though? Wild speculation but I'd imagine a variety of factors that correlate with felonious inclination are anti-correlated with voting.

Since they are banned by law from voting in most places, yes.

No as in 'things that make you more likely to be a felon also make you less likely to be a voter'

Hard to disentangle that when they are barred from voting.

To put out an alternative to all the theories you'll frequently see here about women controlling soft power, maybe women just have more follow through?

Could be that men are better/more capable of signaling socially but then not actually committing to the corresponding action, because they have a more isolated sense of identity. Whereas the identity of women is more directly socially mediated, so their actions are more affected by what they say to others and how they identify on along tribal lines.

To put out an alternative to all the theories you'll frequently see here about women controlling soft power, maybe women just have more follow through?

The conventional wisdom is that "easy voting" (i.e. policies that reduce the friction to vote) helps the left. If your theory is correct, then that's partially backwards -- the follow through required in a low-barrier system would result in more men voting, which in turn would (in aggregate) help the right.

I'm not convinced (at all) of this, but it seems like an interesting corollary.

The type of men and women who benefit from easy voting are not similar to the median voter. When you are discussing the least likely 20% of each coalition to vote that is what you are targeting in get out the vote efforts.

That depends on the distribution of reasons for the set of voters in the least likely 20%.

Above /u/FiveHourMarathon suggests that part of the holdup is that some typically-male jobs don't accommodate ducking out to vote. That's one example of a reason that's not likely to have a large skew on those voters.

My model is a bit different than that. Democrat get out the vote efforts is about cajoling demographics with 80%+ D lean to actually go to the polls. These are basically college students, blacks, and poor single mothers. There aren't really any 80% R lean demos that can be harvested in this manner.

The R strategy would have to be getting a bunch of 60/40 people into the booth by convincing them that the 60 is really worth it.

That's just a question of how you slice up what constitutes a demographic. People who drive pickup trucks, or own boats, or belong to a gun club, or operate heavy power equipment are probably as R as college students are D; Republican failures to target them effectively are a failure of imagination and effort rather than existence.

Before I get accused of saying this to boo outgroup: I've worked with the campaign targeting software offered by both parties. It's playing a World of Warcraft raid with a full suite of add-ons and macros; versus playing SNES Yoshi's island.

Also, huffing my own paint, as I pointed out in a prior post churches are in some ways restricted on political advocacy, this weakens the ability to use churches as demographic groupings for GOTV. But that advantages women anyway.

People who drive pickup trucks, or own boats, or belong to a gun club, or operate heavy power equipment are probably as R as college students are D

But which of those are low-propensity voters? Gun club guys almost certainly are not. Boat and truck ownership puts you solidly in the middle incomes, which is also not associated with low voting rates. Heavy power equipment operators also make good money and its not a 70 IQ job. The low propensity R-voter is adjacent to those sorts of people, but is working a shittier job than those people you pointed out. And they are right next to a 60/40 hispanic guy whos propensity is to vote Dem not Rep.

the follow through required in a low-barrier system would result in more men voting, which in turn would (in aggregate) help the right.

You imply that the male

thought process goes:

"I have a certain amount of willpower X and the effort barrier to my voting is >X, therefore I will not vote"

and thus if the effort barrier for voting is lowered to <X, men will vote. If instead we posit that the male thought process goes

"I have a certain amount of willpower X and the effort barrier to my voting is >0, therefore I will not vote"

then male voters actually WON'T be tempted out to the polls by reductions in effort barriers, because the effort barriers would have to be impossibly small.

Yes, we can debate a threshold vs no-threshold model here. My understand from the empirical results studying Motor Voter and similar programs is that they do something which suggests that there is at least some sensitivity to effort.

I think what I was trying to get at in my original comment is that men could be more likely to 'socially optimize' or lie about voting than women are, for some reason. Not sure I fully endorse that.

the effort barriers would have to be impossibly small.

I think this depends on the context. For instance I would imagine if the 'effort barrier' was that everyone could track if you voted and there was real social status to be gained/lost on your actual participation (as opposed to stated participation), we might see more men vote than women.

Some truth here. My engagement in online economics and politics is probably too 1%. I’ve voted once in my life. Though a confounding variable that mostly lived in areas where my team was going to lose.

This seems to be contradicted by how much more likely men are to sign up to go to war though, even though that's a collective action that doesn't reinforce any isolated sense of identity.

I think war has been the historically 'male' past time, and the activity most associated with glory and/or status. It's natural that more men are drawn to war than women, given the historic focus on war as a way to win glory.

If anything it's amazing that modern society has allowed women to be grunts in war so readily. The modern Western idea of letting women participate formally in the armed services is a remarkable innovation. Given that most of human cultural development has happened in the last ~15,000 years, it's significant that women are only now involved in the armed forces' ground troops of the hegemonic U.S.

All that being said, I see war as one of the last male holdouts, especially since men are still more powerful today in a physically violent sense.

Seems like a straightforward corollary of the Things vs People difference in preferences among genders. Men tend to be more interested in doing physical things and making things and thinking about object level things, while women tend to be more interested in social things and people and interactions.

Voting is an indirect social thing. You are not making the world a better place directly on the object level, you are not building bridges or earning money or arresting criminals as a voter. Instead, you are exerting influence on the assignment of people to a role that will do those things. Voting is not a central example of social interactions, but it fits into it better than it fits into object level things. As such, we should expect women to be more interested in and engaged in voting, and men to be more interested in running for office where they actually get to do stuff directly. (I'm somewhat hesitant on the latter conclusion. You can make an argument that being a politician is still social since you're directing other people to do things rather than physically doing it yourself, but the same is true of being a manager or CEO and we see more men rise to those roles anyway, so it's probably object level enough).

Pleasantly surprised with this book. Very easy to read, I can read it half-distracted. Specks of humor thrown randomly, and well-referenced for a book of its nature.

Any other works from this author you recommend?

C19 - Catchall term to refer to various covid mitigating restrictions, not the disease.

Anti-lockdown protests spread to Wuhan, China

In Shanghai, protesters called for president Xi Jinping to step down while others cried out “give me liberty or give me death” in the city of Chengdu.

^LOL, I don't know what to say about that. I can only hope they get what they want.

So looks like it's finally happening. It's too much even for the Chinese. Enough to go out and protest. 3 years is the upper limit to how long you can carry on with the C19 fugazi it seems.

For the uninitiated: It's really a different world in China. They are still treating C19 with an "abundance of caution". Probably infinitely more caution than most places in the world right now. Notice how all of the protestors are still wearing masks, outdoors! The sad part is that I could have made this post anytime in the last year and it would have been almost exactly the same.

I think one of the frustrating things about C19 was how much it felt like Groundhog Day, regardless of where you were in the world, outside of the US Red States and certain Balkan states- C19 Policies were kept around for so long past their expiry date, time became a meaningless concept.

I mentioned Groundhog day because I made a post about China's C19 excessiveness 1 year ago back in the old country. And keep in mind most countries got rid of the bulk of their restrictions at the time of making that post. My post was about small protests in various places in China. And in a year they have changed exactly 0%.

Many speculated on the reasons behind China's doggedness. Ranging from covid actually being bad and them knowing about it.. because they made it ha!; to China just not willing to lose face.

Not many of those reasons make sense now. China is not run by idiots. It's clear as the day the rest of the World looks down on them for this at the time of writing this. And covid wasn't that bad. So what gives?

Are they that high on their own supply? I think this is strong evidence that China's national consciousness is not connected to the "Real World" enough to actually be a threat to the US long term; A criticism often levied at The Cathedral. GDP can only save you so much from cutting your own dick off. There is really no kind way to say this, they are living in fantasy land.

Remember that a good and just world is one where everything that you have ever wished upon another is visited upon you and those you love a thousand times over. That is why the wise and intelligent man does not pray for justice, he prays for mercy.

Wishing good things on your enemies won't stop them from cutting your throat.

It might not, but it does is make you better than them.

Cold comfort if you are dead. Another reason why I despise shonen manga/anime, that kind of thinking can't die soon enough.

Remember that a good and just world is one where...

This sounds like trying to build consensus. Why should I "remember" something that I don't think is true?

I have no good reply beyond that if you should you choose to be both an idiot and an enemy of Christendom I have no ability to stop you.

Don't call people names. 3 day ban

Isn't Christendom having a pretty hard time of it nowadays? Why would anyone worry about being allied with the losing side?

Not as hard as it has seen, and I think it says something about you that you seem to care more about being on the "winning" and "losing" side than being on the right side, but then I should have guessed as much given your user name and flair.

My flair aligns me with an entirely obscure and wholly powerless at the moment political ideal. I only chose it because I think it's the ultimate right side (hardly the winning side at the moment I must admit, though we've got momentum and potential in many areas), even though even I recognize that a conventional organized political movement is unlikely to be the primary mechanism by which its subordinate principles gain any real social influence (should they) and is far more likely, in proportion to my commitment to pursuing it (luckily I've been reasonable thus far about my investment in it, restricting myself solely to online/anonymous rhetorical dabbling in its favor), to make me a martyr than a victor.

Of course it also promises great reward (which is no moral crime*!) beyond "You'll feel good because you... avoided making your enemies feel bad?" It seems to me like that's kind of the natural lottery principle of politics. The more of an immediate long shot (as I actually think at least the partial supremacy of pedofascist-adjacent ideals is not all that unlikely in the semi-mid-to-far future) your goals are, the more you have to offer in return. "Join us in the counterintuitive plan of wishing fortune on those who oppose us, so that if it succeeds regardless... well, we won't do anything because we're the party of mercy." doesn't seem like a winner to me.

To me, a good and just world is one where the correct wish for the incorrect who stand unjustly in their way to reform in time if possible and ideally make as many reparations as possible for all that they've impeded or, absent a reasonable consummation of that, be brutally subjugated and/or destroyed, and have that wish come true. (We have this now; it's just that in my view it's happening in the reverse, with the incorrect persecuting the correct.)

In this world, all sins would be promptly rectified by the fallen if possible in a reasonable time frame (which would greatly shorten around the time our opposition turns into mere dissidents) or even more swiftly rectified for them. I don't want to pray for mercy for myself or my enemies: I want to be the one deciding who grants mercy to whom.

This is not just what I believe either but also what I can only imagine any properly Aryan and masculine (for there is no true masculinity in "turn the other cheek to get slapped again") Christ and Christendom (should it exist, which I'm not convinced it does at the moment, though some past varieties were close) would also believe. So I may be more aligned with the true, non-semitic, and non-Satanic Christendom of an ideal Godly world than you (surely I'll take the Crusaders, who were far closer to what I'm asking for, than whatever you're offering). Deus vult paedofascismus**!

*says non-slave morality (in the Nietzschean sense, which is not an endorsement of his ideas in general).

**Very loose Latin formulation

What exactly is your political ideal? I do not understand your flair.

libertAryan = Valuing liberty (the positive, invigorating liberty of the non-gender-traitorous man seeking the reasonable fulfillment of his masculine birthright, not degenerate or effeminate "liberty") + the promotion of Aryan power and recognition of Aryan nobility (There's a character limit on flairs you see so linguistic economy via pun was necessary here.)

monarcho- = Possessing of a monarch (who would be mostly ceremonial in my formulation unless he has also independently earned via merit the nonheritable position of fuhrer)

pedo = I doubt I need explain the simple meaning of this. The primary effect of its presence here is that under pedofascism all men shall enjoy their natural masculine birthright of sexual age freedom, which means there shall be no age-based restrictions (ages of "consent" for example) on their enjoyment, particularly in the sexual/romantic realm, of their feminine property (which the feminine shall all be due to androsupremacism).

fascism = This would take the most amount of words to explain the exact desired contours of but also probably needs the least explanation of what it's generally aiming at so I'll just leave it.

absolute androsupremacism = Absolute dominance of masculinity over femininity, with the feminine reduced in status to somewhere around/between wardship, pet status, and/or chattel slavery (depending on the exact requirements of the situation)

public choice appreciator = I like public choice theory and think it deserves more recognition, independently of (though also in addition to) my pedofascism. Should pedofascism not be possible, I'm willing to accept an increase in reasonable governance incorporating public choice theory insights as a consolation prize. (Let this not be confused with me appreciating the choices of the public, which I generally absolutely do not.)

More comments

It seems like there's a bit of a Gell-Mann amnesia effect with how people treat 'happenings' in foreign countries. COVID protests in US (or Canada); danger to democracy, but also just a bunch of idiots who know nothing. COVID protests in China? That's DEMOCRACY™ in action, the will of the people.

No you see China didn't use Putin's entirely unrelated invasion of Ukraine to sweep its pointless restrictions under the rug like they didn't happen so it's the bad guy because of them, unlike the prudent West and its wise, Scientific™ agenda which ended them exactly at the appropriate time.

People forget that if China was a democracy it would have attempted to invade Taiwan like five times by now.

I suspect that a democratic mainland would find Taiwan much more willing to re-unify peacefully.

The irony of this comment coming from the Motte's resident CCP cheerleader is sufficient to generate it's own magnetic field.

China's economy was on the rocks before COVID hit, then they destroyed their supply system, and now they're seriously looking at fuel, fertilizer, and food shortages in the coming year(s) due to Ukraine... major ones.

And all this right as their demographics were set to completely implode, and their housing market (the largest market of any asset in the world) had already started to collapse.

China was always attempting a long takeoff on a short runway given how poor they started and how bad the one child policy fucked them, there has been talk for decades "Will China get old before it gets rich?" (and ergo not be able to afford to care for its elderly, crashing its economy)

Seriously in 2012 at the peak of "China will replace us" hysteria, Niall Ferguson, the Harvard historian, was making documentaries about how China had so little runway and risked plummeting off the abyss if it didn't do everything exactly right, Peter Theil has also spoken extensively on this, ditto Peter Zeihan

And now we know both their engines just exploded before they could take off.

.

This is has been an understood thing amongst the Chinese elite for decades... Get your money out, get your kids to western schools and then residency permits... Who knows if it could all come falling down. There's a reason they were buying millions worth of real estate in western cities they let sit empty , they wanted their money the hell out of China.

And now you can't leave.

Beijing has choked off all new permits to leave the country, has restricted removing capital even further, has some of the harshest travel restrictions that have ever existed outside orthodox communist states...

And well you either had really good plans in place and boxes checked before things went belly up, or now you're screwed.

.

The CCP for the longest time acted as if its legitimacy depended on high growth rates, above 10% ideally, above 5% for sure, down to maybe 1 or 0 in an emergency... But THREE years negative!? And under those conditions, the worst years China has had since Tiananmen or probably Moa, that's when Xi Jinping just declared himself ruler for life...

There's a hell of a lot of turmoil everyone expects to Erupt in China right now... like the memes and clickbait are "China's going to collapse this month/week/hour/minute", but for decades very respected experts have been saying "You know china looks strong but it could get nasty real fast if even a fairly routine economic or geostrategic crisis hits it, they don't have a lot of wiggle room" and we've just seen the equivalent of 5 of 6 hard scenario crises hit them in rapid succession.

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Think of how scared people got with US politics in 2020 how high the temperature rose, lockdown protests, the summer of Floyd, the election, Jan 6th... Think of how many times it was "Wow that could have death spiraled really quickly"...

And then think the US is a wealthy country, that didn't lockdown that hard, could afford to just pay people not to work, the government didn't respond to protests with the need to assert their authority in the most violent way, and even the politicians openly calling each other traitors all pretty much knew they'd all of them retire with their millions.

In China politicians were being executed for partisan corruption charges well before 2019... there's basically no safety net, people die in their homes from lockdown (lack of medicine, food)... Every second there and for the past 2 years has been at a higher defcon level than those first nights of Floyd, or Jan 6 or the first week of lockdown.

Hell we don't know if one the biggest geostrategic events in history has occured, which factions are in charge of Xi, if they've already had lesser coups against eachother that were hushed up...

And that probably the main reason China's doubling down of Zero Covid, sure there's the face saving, and punishing less loyal regions, etc...

But with that much inherent instability in the air it gives the central government an excuse to already have the security state forward deployed incredibly aggressively, already be expanding the camps, already be dragging undesirables out of their homes...

Because if Xi isn't moving against lots of people and moving fast... the obvious question is who's going to move against Xi.

I maintain that the Chinese think this was a biowarfare attack against them. They're using COVID to screen for their biological counterattack.

  1. Dodgy US NGO Ecohealth was messing around with chimeric coronaviruses in Wuhan - 'loses' their files on what viruses they had back in late 2019.

  2. China thinks the US used biowarfare against them in the Korean war, that's their official history.

  3. Conspiratorially minded Chinese elites aren't going to think 'oh it was just random chance: a sick Laotian bat flew to Wuhan and infected a pangolin who infected people'. They're not going to think an American NGO just happened to accidentally leak an extremely dangerous virus in a major Chinese city. Of course, Chinese BSL-4 biolabs are very well run and safe! Why wouldn't the leak happen in America if it were natural? Their most natural explanation is deliberate sabotage from the same country with a history of using biowarfare against them.

  4. They coped with the virus very well in the first two years, squelching it up until Omicron. Chinese death figures are very low, nearly 1000x times less than the US. Even the Chinese can't lie that much.

Given these assumptions, doesn't it make sense to launch a biological counterattack? The US is 100-1000x more vulnerable than China to biowarfare. China has finished setting up all their totalitarian surveillance structure, they've got camps and everything ready. They're 'justified' on the basis that they think the US shot first. If they release something in America, they'll have the advantage of distance and time, something they lacked the first time.

Maybe the MSS is taking their time, ensuring no evidence leads back to China. It's difficult to make it look like an accident and ensure it's lethal enough to be useful. Maybe the Chinese vaccine industry is suffering delays - they have to prepare a vaccine for the new weapon along with their COVID vaccine work. That might explain China's weakness on that front - diversion of effort. The frontline troops for Taiwan will need to be immune to the People's Liberation Plague. Maybe the nuclear forces aren't quite ready - the new subs and missile siloes take time to field. There could be all kinds of things causing a hold-up.

In conclusion, I think Chinese zero-COVID is a rational strategy to buy time for biowarfare and create an excuse for their ultra-high level of readiness. A few small riots and some economic damage are nothing compared to knocking out the entire West in a single blow and securing hegemony in Asia.

They coped with the virus very well in the first two years, squelching it up until Omicron. Chinese death figures are very low, nearly 1000x times less than the US. Even the Chinese can't lie that much.

China absolutely can lie that much. And with such a large population, it's relatively easier to obfuscate deaths. And the west seemed motivated to INFLATE covid numbers, as well. Lots of deaths with COVID, rather than from COVID. Actual COVID deaths are probably somewhere inbetween.

And you might talk of excess deaths, but consider this; China has a lot more deaths of young people from accidents and such. When you lockdown, you have far fewer young people getting killed by machinery, run over in the street, things like that. China also isn't grappling with a drug epidemic. And the average person has a healthy BMI, even the elderly. China would have weathered COVID well regardless of how it handled things. By locking down and making it look like that drove their success, the west was doomed to follow. Telling overweight westerners to stay at home and do nothing was probably the biggest danger to their health.

Agree with @sarker. It seems that even if major powers develop bioweapons, the nuclear truce has held. Why are bioweapons different than nuclear weapons?

Sure you can have deniability, but if Covid-19 were an actual bioattack, it would be a laughably bad attempt. All it does is kill old people who are burden on the system - when China because of the One Child Policy will be hit the hardest by the demographic collapse. If anything Covid is great for China, as it kills older less productive people, and lets the young refill the ranks.

Maybe the nuclear forces aren't quite ready

What does this mean? Is China going to launch a plague, then launch nukes? I'd argue bioweapons only make sense as a deceptive attack, crippling the West before they can strike back with nukes or other superweapons.

Maybe the Chinese vaccine industry is suffering delays - they have to prepare a vaccine for the new weapon along with their COVID vaccine work. That might explain China's weakness on that front - diversion of effort.

This is a far more important argument than you give it credit for. The advantage right now for the US especially is a specialization in research of 'hard sciences,' with biology/medicine being a lucrative and prestigious field. Virology maybe not, but I'd be surprised if Western defense agencies didn't have a much better understanding of viruses than standard academia.

What does this mean? Is China going to launch a plague, then launch nukes? I'd argue bioweapons only make sense as a deceptive attack, crippling the West before they can strike back with nukes or other superweapons.

China doesn't quite have second-strike capability against the US at the moment. They can cause some damage certainly, but a lot of their arsenal could be taken out with a pre-emptive strike. This has implications on the credibility of threats and deterrence. China obviously would want a secure arsenal before taking any risky moves like invading Taiwan. Hence they are building missile siloes and a new class of missile submarines for 2024-25.

I'd be surprised if Western defense agencies didn't have a much better understanding of viruses than standard academia.

I would. Biology and medicine is a huge field, and the vast majority of the research is conducted either in the open (at universities etc., and published in public journals) or by private companies. The US military has some research capacity (Fort Detrick etc.), but it is tiny compared to "standard academia".

Sure you can have deniability, but if Covid-19 were an actual bioattack, it would be a laughably bad attempt. All it does is kill old people who are burden on the system - when China because of the One Child Policy will be hit the hardest by the demographic collapse. If anything Covid is great for China, as it kills older less productive people, and lets the young refill the ranks.

Honestly the biggest frustration of COVID is that it provided a convenient out for the biggest Demographic issue of most affluent states right now and yet every major economy dug the hole even colossally deeper instead of taking the short-term hit to fix their issues.

Last time you posted this (a month ago) I said I'd be happy to bet against a Chinese bioattack in the next year. You didn't take the offer, indicating that you think it's not going to happen in the next year. So when is this going to happen already?

The whole point is that we don't know whether it's a bioattack or not. There's plausible deniability. We live in a world where Daszak and the whole Ecohealth team have not even been arrested! How do you separate bioattack from lableak or natural evolution with great reliability? You can't. Let alone determining that it was Chinese specifically.

There is no plausible universe where I can say 'oh X plague has been proven to be a specifically Chinese bioattack, it's not just American propaganda or whatever else'. I can't get my money if I bet. And if I am right, the money isn't worth very much because we'll have bigger concerns like coughing our lungs out.

Okay, let's bet about a "plague" of any origin coming about in the next year.

If you want to be specific, I'd say 'novel disease kills 500K Westerners by the end of 2025' (about when the Chinese should've finished their preparations). That still excludes the chance that their biowarfare attempt squibs out or gets nipped in the bud. It also excludes them using another novel strain of COVID. I'm rather suspicious of how Omicron had such a huge genetic gap from Delta. What was it doing for those 18 months where it was barely evolving? Trapped in ice, in a lab somewhere?

This is a subject that is very opaque and hard to bet on. Imagine betting on 'US elections are rigged in favour of X'. If they're rigged properly, nobody will be able to prove it. And the definition of rigged can be very expansive, from intelligence agencies suppressing harmful stories to ballot harvesting to making up votes wholesale.

500k Westerners? Covid has killed a million Americans alone despite a 0.1% IFR. Most of the damage came from overreaction than the actual disease.

That's a piss poor bioweapon if there ever was one. If that's the most they can muster even in your imagination we've got nothing to worry about.

Well I was thinking about the time it would take to kill. COVID has been going for 3 years now.

Sure, but it's also a million deaths.

After the first covid death, the USA hit 500k dead in about a year. Again, with a 0.1% IFR.

^LOL, I don't know what to say about that. I can only hope they get what they want.

Laughing at people protesting against tyranny is cruel and small-minded. In my opinion.

I'm laughing at the fact that a Chinese man is using the most American quote of all time given the surrounding historical context that we are living in right now (China hates America more than ever).

There are more dimensions to things than just what's happening at the object level.

this sort of stuff triggers my "made for Western audiences" propaganda alarms

I mean the coverage is what is made for Western audiences, so of course they will use an example that's most recognisable and understandable to Americans, even if most of the protestors wouldn't (and didn't) use that American idiom. I don't find this particularly nefarious or 'propaganda-y'.

particularly nefarious or "propaganda-y" compared to what?

my default position is anything being written about an adversary of the global american empire by corporate media is likely tainted by their influence, i.e., "propaganda-y," so compared to that I agree this isn't particularly so

while others cried out “give me liberty or give me death” i

^LOL, I don't know what to say about that. I can only hope they get what they want.

I don't hope that they get death.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say either is preferable to the most likely outcome: a lifetime spent being reeducated in Correct and Harmonious Xi Jingping Thought at his local inpatient therapy/organ donation facility.

And given how unlikely the liberty part is... I hope it's at least quick.

Not many of those reasons make sense now

when I look at places especially hit hard by the China's zero covid policies, they look to correlate well with power centers of political opposition to the Xi wing of the CCP, e.g., Shenghai

lockdowns are generally harming all of china, but some are being harmed more than others

it appears many Chinese officials ardently and genuinely believe their response works and take pride in it, but I also suspect it continues despite the absurd costs because it comparably benefits Xi's political block

Hundreds of people... for China. That's small. It's basically nothing.

Wikipedia

I would wager there are more than a few hundred given how relatively widespread they are.

China makes gigantic high on their own supply Middle Kingdom complex policy mistakes every 50-60 years or so, this seems like the current example that will hopefully kill fewer people than the great leap forwards/cultural revolution, or the boxer rebellion.

Never... It'd actually be kindof interesting on the 1% this is the thing that Berlin wall's China: The western elite would either have to pivot really fast ,spin hard, or put up with the newly opened China basically being the first of the new generation of revolutionary governments who reject the technocratic class.

Same way monarchist Europe all fretted about Constitutional brittain and then America... then Brittain and the Dutch and the rest became the old guard against republican France... then all the contitutional, repulican, and remaining absolutists all tried to contain bismarkian nationalist Germany then they all were allies almost imediately after ww1 to try and contain socialism... then swung back again to contain fascism... then again to contain internationalist post-war industrialized communism...

Its very likely a chinese revolution would bring in an ideology going hard on right wing Arch-American slogans, the kind our elite loath in their own population, you see it not just in this case but the Hong Kong protests waved American revolutionary slogans, the Chinese Expat and nationalist community, especially the falun gong, is littered with major American-Patriot influence... the Taiwanese swing this way on a lot of stuff.

And right as our own elite are doubling down on treating these as hate symbols, and these sentiments as dangerous extremism... (not to mention what would be revealled if it came out every western figure China was funding or buying off, something the new revolutionaries might tweet out before any of their leaders can tell them no those are their bargaining chips)

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There's a real chance our elites would try t snuff that revolution out rather than let every ideal they ever scorned coalesce there.

They've long seen the chinese leadership as people like them or even people to be admired (remember all the glowing new york times pieces on how China was a model for how the us should run its economy back in the 2010s?)... And they'd rightly perceive that a full throated movement rejecting the CCP and the Chinese bureaucracy could easily coalesce into a wider movement rejecting them...

There's a reason the US prefers former communist countries to become failed states and only became more aggressive against Russia after it converted to capitalism and nominal democracy... young systems of governments run off ideas, and the most prominent ideas are always the ones taboo elsewhere

There's a real chance our elites would try t snuff that revolution out rather than let every ideal they ever scorned coalesce there.

Our elietes aren't going to look a gift horse like 'China unironically embracing The West' in the mouth. It would be a huge vindication for liberal values. It would be a geopolitical upset.

remember all the glowing new york times pieces on how China was a model for how the us should run its economy back in the 2010s

That was off the back of more liberal Hu Jintao. Xi has proven to be more authoritarian and more inclined to sabre rattle.

Our elietes aren't going to look a gift horse like 'China unironically embracing The West' in the mouth. It would be a huge vindication for liberal values. It would be a geopolitical upset.

I've seen no evidence that our elites hold liberal values, so I don't how China embracing them would be equivalent to embracing the West, and if China went actually liberal, we'd probably see hostilities increase.

The problem is that The West these protesters want to embrace already ceased to exist.

Well jeez, nobody tell them that!

What's left of the west would probably still be an improvement in many ways over what they have right now.

But it would have big ramifications for whether our elites would welcome this new China with open arms. Lets put it this way. Wildest dream outcome for the protesters, Xi is overthrown and a new government founded on individual liberties and the rejection of technocrats replaces it. This would be so appealing to me that I'd immediately start learning Mandarin so I can move there / defect to China.

Lockdowns made... some kind of sense in 2019/early 2020 when we had few other tools and the pandemic could have still turned out to be deadlier based on the reports coming out of China. In the past four-odd years conditions have changed. And anyway, Zero Covid has been a much more unhinged regime than the US lockdown ever was.

lockdowns never made sense at any point w/re to covid; there was zero scientific evidence to support them, lots of historical evidence against them, and the costs were enormous

it's why lockdowns were not apart of any pandemic planning

at best, the people pushing lockdowns were midwit morons who bought into suspicious Chinese claims about covid numbers and control even though they admit those numbers were not independently verified and the Chinese have a history of lying about these precise topics

Can you actually cite the evidence against, please?

weird you didn't ask the other person making the opposite claims for evidence, huh

There's a difference between "I think lockdowns sort of made sense" and "science says that lockdowns don't make sense." (It's that one of those gets called out on not citing sources.)

If you say "there is evidence", you're gonna have to expect people saying "well show it then."

you chose to paraphrase similar statements as different in order to justify your one-sided demand for "evidence"

when you do that, it appears to me to be the attrition game in online comments and not genuine search for evidence (not that it necessarily isn't)

I'm working on a top level comment or post w/re to this topic; when/if I post it, I'll tag you.

you chose to paraphrase similar statements as different in order to justify your one-sided demand for "evidence"

The two statements are:

Lockdowns made... some kind of sense in 2019/early 2020 when we had few other tools and the pandemic could have still turned out to be deadlier based on the reports coming out of China.

And

lockdowns never made sense at any point w/re to covid; there was zero scientific evidence to support them, lots of historical evidence against them

The second of those marshals "evidence" to support itself; the first does not. Claiming evidence and not providing any is worse than not claiming any to begin with.

Looking forward to your post!

More comments

Well the Chinese numbers speak for themselves. Let's say the Chinese are lying and took 10x more deaths than they admit. That means they took 40 deaths per million. Officially they took 4 deaths per million. The US took over 3000 deaths per million.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Our too-little too-late omnishambles lockdowns were pointless, the Chinese lockdowns actually worked. I can't imagine that the Chinese could actually cover up three orders of magnitude worth of deaths. How do you conceal that many 'disappearances'?

the chinese numbers certainly do speak for themselves

discussing just how fake they are and making up hypotheticals guessing how off their fake numbers are is a waste of time

I'll concede the 2020 numbers for china were likely similar to the numbers for other surrounding countries which were much lower than much of the West

The US took over 3000 deaths per million.

this metric is plainly dishonest because with and from are not separated and each country uses different metrics to fill in these categories making comparisons very difficult

Our too-little too-late omnishambles lockdowns were pointless, the Chinese lockdowns actually worked.

or china had preexisting immunity to a covid virus which was circulating in 2018

this would explain why countries in southeast asia all had similar numbers irrelevant of their response

I can't imagine that the Chinese could actually cover up three orders of magnitude worth of deaths. How do you conceal that many 'disappearances'?

it wouldn't be "disappearances," it would just be labeling their deaths at something else which, given our experiences in the West in the last few years, it shouldn't be hard to imagine how some deaths can be labeled as something else, e.g., the CDC right now lying and mislabeling tens of thousands of R0-R99 deaths over the last few months and how they mislabeled hundreds of thousands as being killed by covid when the best you could say is they died with a positive covid test in the last month

and when it comes to China and the sheer bulk of people they have, it becomes easier to obfuscate death and causes of deaths because they have far more total deaths per a year than the US, which has demonstrated the ability to mislabel hundreds of thousands of deaths as something else

If your only KPI is COVID deaths per capita, lockdowns are fine. Unfortunately the cost-benefit equation versus practically everything else is hilariously awful.

Let's say the Chinese are lying and took 6000 deaths per million. That's the thing about lying; they're not restricted to small lies.

How do you conceal that many 'disappearances' then?

Just the other day we're hearing about a few hundred people protesting over the strict COVID measures in China. You're implying that these measures never worked at any point if China experienced US-level death tolls. So why did they stick with them? And how are the Chinese concealing 10 million dead from their families, friends, satellites and economic indicators?

People die all the time. Especially old people. If you want to know how many people die, you need mechanisms to collect that information. In China, the government of China controls all those mechanisms.

the Chinese lockdowns actually worked.

That means they took 40 deaths per million.

Makes 0 sense.

Effective lockdowns = Less absolute number of deaths, not fewer deaths per proportion of those who got the disease. What would a lockdown do for someone who is already sick?

The fact that their proportion of deaths is orders of magnitude lower than the Global mean should raise the "China's pants are on fire" alarm, not "lockdowns worked".

E - If it's deaths per population instead death per number of people who got sick then it's back to square one.

E - If it's deaths per population instead death per number of people who got sick then it's back to square one.

?????

I'm talking deaths per million, not deaths per million who got sick! You could easily check this by looking at the stat I linked to.

If you think the Chinese are lying massively, provide some evidence! Are they burning huge numbers of bodies? Did they have a suspicious fall in mobile phone number usage? There's been talk about this - the Epoch Times stated that 21 million phone numbers had been lost, suggesting a very large death toll. Other people have fact-checked that and said there's no way to be sure.

I maintain that if we can hear about a few hundred protestors in Shanghai or various Chinese cities, the world wouldn't have missed hundreds of thousands of Chinese deaths from COVID! These people have families and jobs, they can't just disappear. In Xinjiang maybe but elsewhere?

My bad, I replied assuming the wrong metric.

In which case yes lockdowns did work, given a tortured defining of the word work.

I don't think the optimal covid response involved lockdowns, but that doesn't mean the best case is "midwit morons". A week / month-long lockdown wouldn't have been that bad - even lockdowns as they were just weren't that bad compared to the 200-year history of american political/economic mistakes!

Covid's mortality rate was, on a log scale, only a bit worse than the flu. Diseases with 10-100x higher mortality rates can exist - smallpox, the original SARS, etc - and lockdowns would be justified for those.

A week / month-long lockdown wouldn't have been that bad

Quite to the contrary, these would have been the worst lockdowns. They would incur extreme costs while at best postponing the epidemic for a week or a month. The strongest argument for lockdowns was "flatten the curve" until you compare the capacity of hospitals vs infection rate and find out that it would take years of lockdowns for hospitals to churn through all the cases. Anybody with two brain cells knew that lockdowns will not be there just for a week or a month, that was deliberate tactic in order to persuade population and opposition to accept them. Once the laws and edicts passed lockdowns became what they were.

Also another point that passed by a lot of people was that the early ancestral strain had R0 of around 2.8 and I remember reading about how lockdowns may be able to push that bellow one. The delta strain had R0 of over 5.0 and no amount of reasonable lockdowns or masking could flatten that one: lockdown delta was basically as if no measures ancestral strain. But by then the idiocy was already entrenched, washing of hands, lockdowns and masks were turned basically into religious ritual - something akin to killing cats during plague. Something has to be done, lockdowns are something so let's do it.

lockdowns do not work with flus irrelevant of the cost of them

best case is "midwit morons"

the best case for the people who pushed lockdowns is they're midwit morons who were duped into believing dumb things; it only gets worse from there by assigning them nefarious actions to protect themselves, seize power, etc.

lockdowns were not a part of any pandemic planning guidelines in early 2020 because of their enormous cost and the lack of evidence supporting their efficacy; this was all changed, on a dime, and trying to determine exactly what caused public health derps to launch into a society-wide experiment with incredibly high costs is difficult but it cannot be because of good literature about costs and effects because it did not exist

even lockdowns as they were just weren't that bad compared to the 200-year history of american political/economic mistakes!

what do you think was the economic cost of lockdowns in the USA (which continue to accrue)? if it's not over at least $5,000,000,000,000, we're not being serious about the economic costs alone with those costs continuing to accrue

Diseases with 10-100x higher mortality rates can exist - smallpox, the original SARS, etc - and lockdowns would be justified for those.

smallpox was not stopped with lockdowns and historical evidence does not support the claim they worked at all let alone "were justified"

the original sars sputtered out in almost all places without lockdowns at all making any claims lockdowns were needed to be bunk

your comments rely on assumptions which are simply false; perhaps you can come up with some real disease or make up a hypothetical one which justifies a lockdown

any disease which is deadly enough to justify lockdowns wouldn't need lockdowns because people would voluntarily do it themselves just like they did in the early days of the covid hysteria

the comparison would be between what people do voluntarily and what people do in a government thug enforced lockdown; the more justified a lockdown would be, the smaller the difference in any proposed benefit from the lockdowns

and even if one were to come up with a hypothetical which just-so justifies lockdowns, the history of failure by the public health establishment w/re covid demonstrates they are fundamentally incapable of making the right call and nothing at all which has happened since their catastrophic failure has changed to think they would be any better in the future

lockdowns were not a part of any pandemic planning guidelines in early 2020 because of their enormous cost and the lack of evidence supporting their efficacy; this was all changed, on a dime, and trying to determine exactly what caused public health derps to launch into a society-wide experiment with incredibly high costs is difficult but it cannot be because of good literature about costs and effects because it did not exist

Sources on pre-2020 pandemic planning and the evidence against lockdowns?

the original sars sputtered out in almost all places without lockdowns at all making any claims lockdowns were needed to be bunk

Wasn't the original SARS contained because, unlike COVID-19, people weren't contagious before they got symptoms?

I don't play the sources game for lower comments, but doubly so when the sources demands are one-sided and/or for easily findable materials (e.g., pandemic guidelines in 2019)

Wasn't the original SARS contained because, unlike COVID-19, people weren't contagious before they got symptoms?

no

Many speculated on the reasons behind China's doggedness. Ranging from covid actually being bad and them knowing about it.. because they made it ha!; to China just not willing to lose face.

Not many of those reasons make sense now. China is not run by idiots. It's clear as the day the rest of the World looks down on them for this at the time of writing this. And covid wasn't that bad. So what gives?

Are they that high on their own supply?

Almost every country in the world had leaders powerful enough, and power-hungry enough, to do these sorts of restrictions in 2020 and 2021. Even now-former liberal democracies did them. So I don't think China's policy here has any different motivations. It's just more of the same.

A criticism often levied at The Cathedral. GDP can only save you so much from cutting your own dick off.

Real life is not a 4x, where making your civilians stronger inherently makes you stronger. Rather, Xi (and other leaders) can gain power even as the people they rule over grow poorer. And, ultimately, that is what motivates most of them.

Their "apply huge hammer any time there's been a case or two somewhere" strategy has worked thus far. Sure, they are probably not telling the whole truth about whatever epidemics there have been, but it's unlikely that COVID has actually passed through their society in a big way, like in, say, India; they're still virgin territory, and the reason has been their COVID strategy. There have been spates of large-scale authoritarian measures, but at some point COVID has then gone away, for a while.

Of course there's been a lot of countries that have applied a hard strategy until it was decreed that Covid has evolved to a status where nothing works any longer in keeping COVID out completely, or almost-completely; it's conceivable this simply is the point where China has to admit the same, though that won't stop them from trying for quite a bit.

COVID passed through their society in 2018 and served as an immunity buffer for the wuhan variant as did most of southeast Asia

the reason has been their COVID strategy

the reason has been their covid strategy despite other countries who didn't use their covid strategy with far more reliable numbers and still had similar outcomes in the first year

and other countries which did use their strategy and with far more reliable numbers and it failed spectacularly

your causal statement is simply unsupported

COVID passed through their society in 2018 and served as an immunity buffer for the wuhan variant as did most of southeast Asia

I haven't encountered this claim before. Can you point me to some sources?

why are all your sources! demands seemingly one-sided?

I would actually like to read about it as well. It's a claim I've never heard before and would like to know more. Not to dunk on you. I was against lockdowns from day one. For libertarian reasons mostly. Although now I've realized a few more things about them. Namely that they're historically unprecedented and they don't work as far as any viruses are concerned.

That's fair. Maybe I'm too used to other lower quality websites (and posters) and I shouldn't bring that here. In most of the internet, demands for sources without demonstrating any effort has been put in is a flag the person is playing effort games as opposed to open to genuine dialogue.

Because of the response I received to some of my posts in this thread, I'm working on a submission or top level comments with linked evidence and a filled out argument. When/if I post it, I'll tag some of the users in here who asked for more.

COVID passed through their society in 2018 and served as an immunity buffer for the wuhan variant as did most of southeast Asia

Why didn't it pass through the entire world, then?

the reason has been their covid strategy despite other countries who didn't use their covid strategy with far more reliable numbers and still had similar outcomes in the first year

Which countries?

and other countries which did use their strategy and with far more reliable numbers and it failed spectacularly

Which countries?

Why didn't it pass through the entire world, then?

it did with the epicenter being in southeast Asia

Which countries?

Japan

Which countries?

Italy

Is the support for your causal statement only that reported Chinese numbers were low post frothing at the mouth, people dropping dead in the streets videos?

Not many of those reasons make sense now

I think the whole 'not losing face' argument still makes sense. In fact the more they double down, the more face they have to lose. As @DingleberrySoup pointed out, the vaccination situation over there just makes the stakes even higher for the CCP.

The CCP is, rightly, highly concerned about the public perception around their leadership. If they cop to pointlessly locking down over a billion people for years, including things like forcing workers to stay 24/7 at factories and welding apartment complex doors shut to control traffic, things will get very bad for them indeed.

Yep.

It's one of those policies where you can't just quietly drop it and people might mostly forget.

Dropping it means admitting it may not have ever been necessary, and maintaining it means possibly burning people's patience/goodwill.

And letting the people overturn the policy via protest is just as bad.

Genuinely is no way out that doesn't make the leadership look bad.

Anti-lockdown protests spread to Wuhan, China

It does not seem like much, and I think it's far too early to conclude that this is a harbinger of something more significant. I think the media is over-reporting for clicks .

I would be concerned even if there weren't anti-lockdown protests. Besides, do you trust the reporting coming out of China?

My priors say that it's more likely news of these protests would be suppressed than blasted over the mediascape.

So what gives?

I don't think it's all that complicated. If they lift all restrictions right now, they're looking at a death toll potentially in the millions because their vaccine doesn't work (embarrassing in and of itself), and they're worried that the population will blame the party for this whole predicament (which they should).

The CCP is kicking the can down the road, or digging a hole for themselves. Whichever analogy you prefer.

Okay, millions will die, but so what? These will be overwhelmingly old people dying. Nobody really cares a lot about old people dying: indeed, millions die every year for reasons other than Covid, and nobody gives a shit.

It would have been hugely different if, for example, children were at risk; I certainly know I’d approach Covid much differently if that was the case. Huge death toll of old people, though, simply does not have similarly big emotional appeal and practical impact on society.

Okay, millions will die, but so what? These will be overwhelmingly old people dying. Nobody really cares a lot about old people dying: indeed, millions die every year for reasons other than Covid, and nobody gives a shit.

Old people are the core support of the CCP and their proxies in Hong Kong, Macao etc. People who don't want disruption and just want a quiet, comfortable life where they get the basics and avoid the cruel eyes of the people in power. There's even a term for this kind of existence in Chinese:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%81%8E%E6%97%A5%E5%AD%90

Such a concept would understandably evolve in a highly inegalitarian agricultural society, as Mainland China has been until very recently. Do the work that the landowner requires of you and no more; avoid being assigned extra work by the supervisor; don't get in trouble. That way, you have a good chance at gaming the calories in / calories out ratio to put on some fat before the next bad harvest or civil war. If you work hard, you will be leaner and at more risk of death when the hard times come, but you will receive little rewards outside of heaven...

The CCP and its proxies have learnt the secret to governing China, which is to keep people doing 過日子 content. The youth will always have their periods of rebellion, the intellectuals can never be trusted, and the ambitious must be monitored within broad limits, but most Chinese people are happy to do the minimum amount of work, play on their phones whenever they can, and obey the copious orders that Chinese society provides for them in lieu of giving them initiative.

If China became a competitive democracy tomorrow (or maybe until yesterday...) I would expect the CCP to win the first elections, because they have the elders on their side. However, mass deaths among the old would severely hurt the CCP in three directions: lost supporters to covid, lost supporters due to elders' resentment at the failure to keep them safe, and lost supporters due to the outrage of the younger generations at the (salient) death of their parents and grandparents.

You ask that question after bearing witness to tons of people suddenly concerned about "killing grandma" (i.e. marginally contributing to grandma's statistically likely demise)?

Old people dying is nothing new. Old people dying in a way that someone can be stuck with the blame for it, on the other hand...

A death toll in the millions from Omicron? I find that hard to believe.

Looking here (select interval --> cumulative and check box "relative to population"), middle of the road looks like 2000-2500 deaths per million, and that's for counties that had the benefit of vaccines that worked to reduce severity considerably.

China's population of 1.4B multiplied by that range yields considerably more than 2M, and that's before you account for an older population and higher rates of smoking. Or putting it backwards, in order to stay under 1M, the would need a death rate under 600pm, which would be 1/4 that of wealth countries.

One the one hand, china’s really old and they smoke a lot. On the other hand, Covid isn’t that dangerous. On the gripping hand, they have to realize that they can’t keep the restrictions up forever and they’re as ready to rip the bandaid off as they’ll ever be.

It's clear as the day the rest of the World looks down on them for this at the time of writing this.

I wouldn't be so optimistic about the rest of the world. I can't tell if the intent is to make vaccine passes the new normal or just to make preparations for the next pandemic (the Indonesian health minister wants to introduce them in May iirc, will find the link once I'm finished my shift), but here's an excerpt from what was agreed to at the recent G20 meeting:

"We acknowledge the importance of shared technical standards and verification methods, under the framework of the IHR (2005), to facilitate seamless international travel, interoperability, and recognizing digital solutions and non-digital solutions, including proof of vaccinations. We support continued international dialogue and collaboration on the establishment of trusted global digital health networks as part of the efforts to strengthen prevention and response to future pandemics, that should capitalize and build on the success of the existing standards and digital COVID-19 certificates."

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/11/16/g20-bali-leaders-declaration/

You can interpret it that way, or you can interpret it as a symbol for facilitating a vaccine travel system that already preceded COVID, ie. yellow fever vaccination certifications and so on, expect digitally and in an interoperable way (and this doesn't necessarily even mean using lack of vaccination to prevent travel, simply that health services in different countries know what vaccinations have been given in other countries, which might be useful medical information any which way in cases of emergencies etc.) Like government speech is wont to be, it's probably deliberately ambiguous.

I think you're viewing this through too much of a US culture war lens. Here we never had any lockdown on par with what was going on in China or some other countries, so complaints focused more on masks and vaccines. In China they're talking about shutting down manufacturing in areas where there are only a handful of cases and closing all shops except grocery stores. Even at the height of the lockdown things weren't that bad in the US, and the height only lasted a couple months in the spring of 2020.

Grabby Aliens is a Terrible Model

My understanding of Robin Hanson’s Grabby Aliens argument is as follows:

  1. Over time, most of the universe will be claimed by Grabby Aliens, leaving less and less room for other alien civilizations

  2. Therefore, most civilizations in the universe will appear near the beginning of the universe, before the Grabby Aliens are so visible and powerful

  3. Therefore, it’s no mystery that we find ourselves near the beginning of the universe, without other aliens in sight

Please let me know if I’ve misunderstood his argument--I’m sure I’ve lost some detail in this summary but the gist of it is that based on outside view it makes perfect sense that aliens are fairly common but that they’re not visible to us yet.

However, this is obviously the wrong perspective through which to view the issue. The outside view works on a civilizational level, yes. If we accept all premises, it makes sense that most civilizations would find themselves “early” in a cosmic sense. But on an individual level, which I’d argue is the much more relevant perspective, the vast, vast majority of individuals should be born into Grabby Alien civilizations.

So my argument is:

  1. If Grabby Aliens exist, in time most of the universe will be claimed by grabby aliens of one sort or another

  2. If at least one Grabby Alien civilization doesn’t immediately succumb to AI or a similar thing, the incredibly vast majority of sentient beings will be born under Grabby Alien rule

  3. It doesn’t matter what the distributions of early civilizations is, because how individuals are born is a more relevant, powerful, and potentially accurate use of Outside View

  4. Therefore, the Fermi Paradox has not been resolved; it’s just been transmuted into the question “Why weren’t we born into a Grabby civilization at its peak?”

  5. (optional) If going by the outside view, I personally find it more likely that we actually have been born into a Grabby civilization, and are being fooled into thinking we’re alone. This is highly speculative though.

There are of course large weaknesses to using the outside view at all, but I’m just trying to use all the same premises that the original argument did. It frustrates me to see so many rationalists essentially dismiss the issue as solved now that a prominent rationalist has come up with an argument against it, when the argument is so weak.

I’d love to hear what you guys think.

But on an individual level, which I’d argue is the much more relevant perspective, the vast, vast majority of individuals should be born into Grabby Alien civilizations.

I actually disagree, if the gist of this argument is supposed to be some version of doomsday argument. The main weakness here I think is vague definition of individual. Who is individual, what traits does it have to have? Even for Earth, I'd say that in one end of the spectrum basically all mammals count as individuals, possibly even every insect is an individual and so forth, so can one argue that we are supposed to be living in the average period of mammalian/life dominance? And on the other hand I can say that individual is as narrow as georgioz at the time he was born. There was no other individual like georgioz ever created and there never will be one. The pool of georgioz individuals is exactly 1, and he was born when he was born so there can be no further argument made out of it.

In the end I find Fermi paradox/Doomsday/Ontological proof of god arguments as faulty way to logic something into existence. Out of all of them, Fermi paradox is at least useful as it tries to identify some parameters and logical assumptions which clarifies thinking. But it cannot be resolved on its own merit or by using other logic.

I want to call this a "reference class fallacy". Any logical conclusion derived from treating something concrete as a typical member of a larger reference class.

To analyze it from another angle: the narrower the reference class you're arguing based on, the more statistical power your argument has. If I can prove something about everybody named /u/georgioz, I have proved quite a lot about you as an individual. But if I'm proving something that only holds in a statistical aggregate of all humans, I have gained almost no knowledge about you specifically. All I have gained is a tiny probability.

A reference class fallacy is when you pick an absurdly big reference class (e.g. all individuals) and then use reasoning based on the big reference class to infer knowledge about a potentially very small, distinguished subset (e.g. yourself, or even just humanity) of that reference class.

Since the reference class of individuals in the grabby aliens argument is potentially massive, the uncertainty of whether statistical statements over the entirety of that reference class applying to us specifically becomes quasi-infinitely high, thus making the argument vanishingly unlikely to be valid.

I agree, however there is also something to be said about arbitrary selection of the reference class. For instance in doomsday argument it is just assumed that humanity is a reference class. Why not all hominids? Why not just all accounts that are subscribed to The Motte including bots? Using the latter example both bots and human users have something in common - they are subscribed to The Motte. But there is not much else to be said for it or infer from it. It may be the case that even if two concepts are overlapping in certain category, it is erroneous to assume that there may be some meaningful knowledge gained by projecting information you have from one well researched concept (let's say in this case well known human users) onto other concept (in this case bots). Including basic information regarding how many are there to be in the future or some such.

The origin story of doomsday argument is supposed to be WW2 Allied intelligence operation, where they observed number painted on German tanks and ascertained how many of them were likely produced using statistics. But in that case the reference class was well defined and grounded. For instance intelligence agencies were interested in all German tanks already produced - they were not interested in tanks produced in WW1 or Leopard tanks produced in 2020. They probably had some hard intelligence regarding how the numbers were assigned - e.g. that they were assigned sequentially and not randomly as is the case for instance with certain countries/states vehicle license plates. They also had additional data, for instance if they observed a tank numbered 1,000,000,000 they would have known that their methodology is flawed as it was not physically possible for Germans to have one billion tanks.

I think any reasonable definition will include more Grabby Aliens than humans, or mammals on grabby alien planets, etc.. I agree with your point though and find this whole perspective very unconvincing.

This never occurred to me at all, and I doubt Hanson had this in mind.

The model itself is controversial along what could be called culture lines. But more importantly our debates about the what is appropriate child entertainment could use some cosmic horror discussion to remind us of scale. Or, the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin debate could use an occasional check in on the status of invading forces.

We should have a regular nerd talk thread.

Friday Fun Thread

But what if I want to discuss why we will be lucky if we are just exterminated. That's not fun.

People here may have a wider definition of 'fun' than you think. I'd find it fun.

There's not much of one--maybe I should have posted in the Friday Fun thread or something. I do find it frustrating how popular this sort of anthropic reasoning has gotten in rationalist circles. I feel like we (inasmuch as I'm a rationalist anyways) are thinking ourselves into circles with ridiculous speculative thought experiments that direct curiosity away from more productive venues.

there is none. probably belongs in the main forum, not here

For once I have to agree with GE.

It’s more like: we should expect for life to colonize as much of the universe as it can. Since we can’t see other life in our lightcone, we are probably in the early days of universe colonization. A secondary claim would be: you should expect to be born into the most populous point in history. You are born now, so the very plausible interstellar future is somehow less populated than today. A very plausible mechanism is selection towards a singular group or individual that does all of the future colonization.

I personally find it more likely that we actually have been born into a Grabby civilization, and are being fooled into thinking we’re alone. This is highly speculative though.

I also think we have been born into--well, I basically agree with you word-for-word right up until the very end, where "highly speculative" doesn't describe my views as well as "infringing on the copyright protecting a 2015 Wachowski film."

I mean, if there's a better answer to the Fermi Paradox than "they aren't visiting Earth because our population too small for grinding us all up into a filmy paste and selling it as skin-and-tentacle rejuvenation creams wouldn't break even--by about 20%," I haven't heard it.

Why weren’t we born into a Grabby civilization at its peak?

Because no one will be. Grabby civilizations are likely made up of non-sentient robots.

How would that work ? Isn't sentience required to run a civilization ?

Probably not humanlike sentience. We have highly adaptable, general purpose brains. Grabby aliens will probably get expansion down to an exact science which will require only purpose built machines to do specific tasks. It seems unlikely to me that the beings in that civilization would have the general intelligence required to be part of the reference class that wonders about its place in the universe. That would probably get selected out for being a waste of resources.

Sentience isn't intelligence.

Sentience is the capacity to experience qualia, essentially consciousness. (Frogs for example are perfectly sentient as far as we know.) Robots can probably be really smart and capable of making decisions just as complex as any conscious human (maybe, as we don't really fully understand sentience/consciousness at all yet) but without the actual experiencing subjective sensations part.

That might not actually be .. true.

Even Peter Watts, one of the most rabid fans* of the whole consciousness != intelligence thing has come to have some doubts.

I say "rabid fan" because he wrote two terrifying, acclaimed sf books about it.

What they’ve got, as it turns out, is a nifty little proof-of-principle in support of the Free-Energy-Minimization model I was chewing over last April. Back then it was Mark Solms, forcing me to rethink my assertion that consciousness could be decoupled from the survival instinct. The essence of Solms’ argument is that feelings are a metric of need, you don’t have needs unless you have an agenda (i.e., survival), and you can’t feel feelings without being subjectively aware of them (i.e., conscious). I wasn’t fully convinced, but I was shaken free of certain suppositions I’d encrusted around myself over a couple of decades.* If Solms was right, I realized, consciousness wasn’t independent of survival drives; it was a manifestation of them*.

Well certainly I admit it's an open question. I just mean that the ideas are wholly conceptually separable and thus theoretically an actual empirical distinction between them is quite possible. Maybe "probably" in my original answer is assuming too much certainty.

and you can’t feel feelings without being subjectively aware of them (i.e., conscious).

.. the thing is, people, at least myself, can have emotions and without consciously feeling them.

It's not common but for example I can be fearful of something without feeling fear.

I honestly don't remember what it likes to feel fear, though I believe I used to feel it. Now there's just sort of .. detached numbness, and a distinct but impossible to explain unwillingness to do what I'm guessing I'm afraid of.

Well that depends what you mean by "civilization".

But if we just mean it as "thing which uses up all the resources in it's light cone", then a paperclipper is that, and a paperclipper doesn't have to be sentient. Some would even argue that it is required not to be sentient, because if it were sentient it would realise paperclipping is a stupid objective.

Robin's view makes sense if we consider ourselves in the reference class of sentient beings experiencing a Fermi paradox. Robin's theory explains why we exist very early in the universe given our reference class. I think if we take our reference class to be sentient beings we should assume we are in a computer simulation run by Hawking radiation since for the vast majority of the time the universe will be capable of sustaining life we will be in the black hole era where the only source of free energy will be Hawking radiation. In the black hole era, the expansion of the universe will have made being a grabby civilization obsolete.

Why should we assume that the simulation is run by Hawking radiation in particular? If indeed we are in a simulation, it could well be the case that the universe containing the "hardware" running the simulation has free energy from sources other than Hawking radiation.

In fact, there is no strong reason a priori to assume that the universe-containing-the-simulator is similar to our (supposedly simulated) universe in any way whatsoever, except for similarities that are required for a simulation to exist in the first place -- so, for example, we can safely assume that the universe-containing-the-simulator has a nonzero amount of free energy ... that is, unless the assumption that computation requires free energy is itself a requirement only in our (simulated?) universe, and not a universal multiversal truth!

I think that panspermia is relatively common, complex life is rare among worlds with life (reference: Nick Lane), intelligent technological civilizations rare among worlds with complex life, and civilizations capable of interstellar travel on any reasonable timeframe are either rare among intelligent technological civilizations or do not exist.

I think the question here isn't "should you, as a person expect to be born into a mostly-empty universe", but rather, "should you expect to be part of a race that has mostly conquered the universe without resistance from other aliens".

In some ways I think people are insufficiently paranoid about the implications of this question, though. I think it's likely that, a few millennia from now, we'll realize that life can be roughly modeled as

Intelligent life forms on a planet, then immediately expands in all directions at the maximum possible travel speed (plus or minus some factors that aren't relevant on an astronomical scale).

And you can kind of use this to break things down into four options.

If humanity is the first species and FTL travel is possible, then we're going to settle the entire universe with no resistance.

If humanity isn't the first species and FTL travel is possible, then this may simply be a paradox; we haven't been settled, therefore our assumptions are wrong.

If humanity is the first species and FTL travel isn't possible, then we will expand in a sphere, roughly at light speed, and eventually meet up with other species that will be less advanced than us and therefore pose little threat.

If humanity isn't the first species and FTL travel isn't possible . . . then we live in a universe full of species-spheres rapidly expanding, and we will be absolutely crushed when we encounter the first one of them.

This is concerning.

I have nothing to add to the original point, but here's my hobby horse when it comes to interstellar civilizations: As far as we know, you can't go faster than light or even nearly as fast by any practical means, and you can't freeze and thaw people. Assuming that interstellar business isn't entirely relegated to robots and computers, because that would be narratively boring, we're looking at generation ships and a lot of generations. There will need to be social technology, or just technology, to keep people dozens or hundreds of generations down the line aligned with the plans and values of those who launched them. It doesn't matter much whether this refers to colonization or trade or conquest or diplomacy - how would an actual biological species or civilization ensure that the people it sends out to other stars remain even remotely committed to the cause that sent them? And then, how do you ensure that the people who do the sending don't change so much that by the time the mission comes back with whatever returns are expected, they're no longer able to meaningfully interact with them?

I posit that any spacefaring biological civilization will be conformist and conservative to an extreme and probably unimagined degree, by necessity.

'Universe' is big.

Positing galactic colonization, sure. Otherwise..

One possibility I never see represented is that maybe capping out on tech isn't actually that hard on these timescales. Maybe once you get into the rapidly expanding bubble phase everyone has the same tech and there is some defensive advantage asymmetry that robs the first mover of an advantage.

Why shouldn't the rapidly expanding sphere thing apply to earth scale conflict? Even with vast technological supremacy the west has repeatedly be unable to conquer parts of the globe it would quite like to conquer. The future of all universal species might just be infinite multi-polar cold wars, or if I dare to dream, Star Trek style interspecies cooperation.

Why shouldn't the rapidly expanding sphere thing apply to earth scale conflict? Even with vast technological supremacy the west has repeatedly be unable to conquer parts of the globe it would quite like to conquer. The future of all universal species might just be infinite multi-polar cold wars, or if I dare to dream, Star Trek style interspecies cooperation.

Keep in mind that in this analogy, we're probably the Sentinelese.

Theoretically, civilizations which can manage interstellar travel would be locked in MAD because if you can accelerate a ship to relativistic speeds and decelerate it into orbit, you can accelerate a very large rock into relativistic speed to crash into the planet and wipe out all life therein with no possibility of defense, orbital mechanics being generally well understood.

If you have an interstellar civilization based around some manner of FTL travel, whatever exotic technology is in use would also probably provide weapons of mass destruction- Alcubierre drives as currently understood could generate a massive gamma ray burst fairly easily, and that’s assuming that Alcubierre drive operation can’t be used to directly tear planets apart. A civilization which can build krasnikov tubes or artificial wormholes can also probably launch relativistic kinetic weapons, the energy requirements to build the other end being if anything more impressive.

I had considered going into the details of why defense might have some asymmetry, like maybe it's pretty easy to put a dead man's switch type deal that makes a defended star system unusable if threatened. Really it doesn't seem like the kind of thing we'd be able to predict with current day physics knowledge, maybe dark matter can be used as a relativistic shield of some sort.

A relativistic bombardment would also make a planet unusable on less-than-geologic timescales, right? It seems like it should(although a gamma ray burst probably wouldn’t, even if it requires a planet get re-terraformed). No doubt sci-fi ftl changes the equation because faster than light sensors can give much more of an early lead time on relativistic bombardments, but any kind of shielding that works against, say, a dinosaur killer at .7 C is beyond physics as commonly understood.

I have to admit, I now kind of want to see the motte coming up with a hard sci-fi universe of its own centered around some kind of interstellar Cold War.

The dark forest looms large in such a discussion, but I do think it got the game theory wrong. I think in general in the space future a lot of civilization leaves the gravity wells and never returns.

Why? Everything a civilization needs is in gravity wells- energy, materials, resources. Given interstellar travel times it makes more sense to stick near a source of fuel and materials when you can.

Gravity wells will be used and mined but they're too easy of targets. And the friction of escaping the well to trade is going to be very important.

Even with vast technological supremacy the west has repeatedly be unable to conquer parts of the globe it would quite like to conquer.

Incorrect.

Moldbug has a piece on this which I was just reading the other week but now can't retroactively find (the wonders of living life on incognito mode), so you'll have to excuse my paraphrasing of the argument:

The West is perfectly capable of conquering e.g. Afghanistan. Because the West has nuclear weapons and Afghanistan doesn't. A handful of hydrogen bombs, and there are literally no Afghanis left alive to stop you from taking their clay and holding it in perpetuity. The West's failure to conquer Afghanistan is because the West self-restricts itself from deploying its high tech, not because the high tech ain't up to the job.

That being said, while I object to your analogy I think your overall point is sound. I can believe that after a couple more thousand years there will just be no more hyoeradvanced applied physics left to discover; the tech tree of Reality may indeed have an end that soon.

TBH, the west doesn’t have much difficulty conquering things it has strong reasons to conquer. Afghanistan was a failure because we didn’t think it was worth it to keep fighting. Same with Vietnam.

I think what you and @Butlerian are missing is that this is very much how you defend yourself successfully from stronger foes: you turn any fight into a quagmire and retain levels of enthusiasm for wanton slaughter of invaders that they cannot sustain.

The West can not conquer Afghanistan. Not because it lacks materiel, but because it lacks the will and it would destroy western society to try to manifest it. Vociferation about how you could have wiped your adversary off the map if only they didn't use successful tactics are always vacuous, whatever the tactics.

War is the art of making the enemy do what you want. Not of having the best weapons.

I think technological limits could drastically change the shape of the results.

For example, if offensive technologies are really easy and defense is really hard, then you might get a MAD sort of truce.

If creation of valuable resources is easy there might be no benefit to seizing a bunch of solar systems.

If information and entertainment become the most valuable/scarce resources then you'd have a situation where older civilizations foster and grow new ones.

If humanity isn't the first species and FTL travel isn't possible . . . then we live in a universe full of species-spheres rapidly expanding

The second claim doesn't follow from the first. The thing about universe is that it's vast and lack of FTL will immensely slow expansion on a galactic scale. For a "rapidly expanding sphere" to get far, the expansion has to actually be fast and last long enough before the civilization collapses (from galactic scale expansion perspective). Neither of these two are in any way set in stone.

It doesn't have to be very fast, because geological timescales are so large.

Consider colonization of the milky way.

The width of the galaxy is 100,000 light years. Let's say some civilization travelled at .0001 the speed of light between stars (the fastest man made probe is travelling at .0005 the speed of light) . And on average they had to stop every light year to build up, grow crowded, and then expand outward again. These stops take them 1000 years.

It would take them 200 million years to colonize the galaxy if they started at the very edge. Which is a long time for an individual, but short on geological timescales. If Earth2 on the opposite side of the galaxy had dinosaurs with a space program at the same time we had dinosaurs, then they would have already arrived here before humans evolved.

Yeah, but you obtain that result only because you're limiting your consideration to the Milky Way. Why so provincial? There are superclusters out there! Geological timescales are large, but the universe is seemingly infinitely vast. The total wealth a future civilization will be able to claim depends entirely on when they start and how fast they expand.

Yeah, this is pretty much what I'm getting at; the scale is so huge that everything kinda rounds off to irrelevance.

What would happen if two species-spheres formed at opposite ends of the Milky Way at exactly the same time? Would it be possible to negotiate a partition of the galaxy in half? Or would the equilibrium be so unstable that one side would inevitably win? Would the two species-spheres comingle to become like a single species?

What would happen if two species-spheres formed at opposite ends of the Milky Way at exactly the same time?

We're talking about a multi-million-year timespan where things can happen, where a thousand-year (or perhaps even a hundred-year) gap is enough for total technological dominance. The chance that it happens at exactly the same time is negligable.

For all the other questions, I mean, maybe, we don't really know; the problem is that just one warlike species, with better technology, may be a rather unstoppable threat.

I think attempting to model aliens is vacuous at best and mental masturbation at worst. I'm talking about sincerely trying to discuss whether intelligent nonhuman lifeforms actually exist as the end goal; As opposed to doing so with the purpose of some kind of thought experiment.

Astronomical measurements are so indescribably mind-bendingly large. And that we can't even observe a mere fraction of that, and even if we could those distances are so large that for the overwhelming majority of your search space you would be literally looking into 10^bruh years into the past.

With those numbers, the imagination constrained by "grabbiness" or "society" or "succumbing to AI", just seems like poor epistemic hygiene (or disregard) if discussed earnestly and not as a thought experiment as a proxy for something else.

The [known:unknown:unknown unknown] ratio of sincerely discussing the mechanics of potential aliens is well into discussing the simulation, the existence of Allah other generic "deep" discussions.

I think it's pretty safe to discuss it as a sort of "lower bound." "If we're 100% correct about laws of physics, nothing surprising comes up, and aliens don't get that much more advanced, what will things be like in 10 billion years?" is a fun discussion, or uncharitably it's vacuous. I agree that we don't know enough to be making far-reaching conclusions based on our limited available knowledge, which is part of why I posted this. I'm tired of people thinking that the issue of "we're alone in the universe" has been solved because an influential but misguided paper on it was published.

I think we should withhold judgement of these things until we're more advanced.

Right now, we understand about 5% of the energy in the universe. 'Dark' matter and energy that makes up the overwhelming majority of everything. My pet theory is that these are the aliens we're looking for. I think that Dyson Spheres, Matrioshka brains and black hole harvesting is a suboptimal use of resources, that it's not worthwhile for a truly advanced civilization. True masters manipulate dark matter/energy, they couldn't care less about Baryonic matter. Baryonic matter is for beginners - advanced nations on Earth don't burn animal waste or wood for fuel anymore. It's not efficient. Aliens don't care about the stars. That's my explanation for Fermi.

But I don't know because we aren't wise enough to understand these things. I think a lot of theorists overreach. We don't have quantum gravity. We don't understand 95% of the universe's energy. We're only 300-400 years into the Scientific Revolution, we haven't even developed fusion power! How can we pontificate on the billion-year scale? How can we speculate on the methods of civilizations vastly superior to our own?

For sure, but I do still like disagreeing with people on their terms.

Therefore, the Fermi Paradox has not been resolved; it’s just been transmuted into the question “Why weren’t we born into a Grabby civilization at its peak?”

The Simulation Hypothesis has an answer for you: we were.

I don't see that as an answer at all: it just pushes the question down a level. If we're in a simulation, why weren't we born into a Grabby civilization inside it?

That isn't a very compelling counterargument unless you have reason to believe that the simulators will simulate more experiences within grabby civilizations than not. It may be that bespoke single-player experiences better fit the designs of the simulators, and grabby civilizations in their prime aren't the most useful backdrop for those experiences. Or it may be that the simulators are our own descendants trying to learn more about their pre-grabby past.

That isn't a very compelling counterargument unless you have reason to believe that the simulators will simulate more experiences within grabby civilizations than not

Well that's the whole point of my post. Our current understanding of physics suggests that more experiences will happen inside grabby civilizations than outside, which suggests that for some reason simulators want to simulate that. Positing that we're in a simulation does not change this observation at all.

Our current understanding of physics suggests that more experiences will happen inside grabby civilizations than outside

Agreed

which suggests that for some reason simulators want to simulate that

No, this is where I disagree. You are claiming that a grabby civilization at its peak will simulate more experiences that appear subjectively from within the simulation to be part of a grabby civilization than that do not. But why? You and I know almost nothing about what kinds of simulation an advanced civilization would want to run.

Look, you're conflating two things here.

  1. Based on our understanding of the universe, it appears that more sentient entities will be born within Grabby civilizations

  2. Grabby civilizations are by definition more capable of simulating vast quantities of entities, meaning that more entities will be simulated by Grabby civilizations

My post focused entirely on #1. I don't think #2 is very logical, since we don't really know what the rules of the reality simulating ours are, or if there really are any rules at all. I think it's a bit of a reach to surmise that they will follow similar rules, but assuming that the rules are similar, then I suppose #2 is correct and it's probably a Grabby civilization simulating us.

The point I'm trying to make is that the truthiness of #2 doesn't strongly affect #1. and our observations (inasmuch as outside view can be trusted) seem to support #1.

You and I know almost nothing about what kinds of simulation an advanced civilization would want to run.

Exactly, so we can safely reason as if we're not in a simulation, in which case my post remains uncontested.

Here was your original question:

Therefore, the Fermi Paradox has not been resolved; it’s just been transmuted into the question “Why weren’t we born into a Grabby civilization at its peak?”

The Simulation Hypothesis demonstrates that we are likely not in the bottom layer of reality. If this universe is real, then it looks like we'll soon be able to (and likely will) simulate a large number of sentiences, which means it would have been massively coincidental that our indexical experience was located in the "real universe." This does not tell us much about what the simulators' universe actually looks like, or what resemblance it bears to ours, if any, but it does tell us that we probably aren't in the bottom layer. This suffices to dispatch your purported transmutation of the Fermi Paradox.

If the Fermi Paradox is even meaningful at the layer of the simulators' universe, then the answer is that we probably were born (simulated) into a grabby civilization at or near its peak. If the Fermi Paradox isn't meaningful at the layer of the simulators' universe, then it has been resolved. Take your pick, but either way your purported transmutation of the Fermi Paradox isn't paradoxical anymore.

Yeah, but if the Fermi Paradox isn't meaningful on that base layer, it could still be meaningful on this current layer, which is the layer I was talking about.

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Well that's the whole point of my post. Our current understanding of physics suggests that more experiences will happen inside grabby civilizations than outside, which suggests that for some reason simulators want to simulate that.

I don't understand why you think B follows from A.

Our current understanding of physics suggests that amongst IRL, non-simulated beings more experiences will happen inside grabby civilizations than outside. But there's no reason to think that Grabbys will predominantly run simulations of other Grabbys. If anything, they should be running simulations of any civilizational stage EXCEPT Grabbyness because if they want to know what being in a Grabby civilization looks like, they need only look out the window, no need to sim it.

We should therefore think it probable to be born as (a) an IRL Grabby or as (b) a simulation by but not of a Grabby.

Simulated civilisations are not subject to the same anthropic logic as non-simulated civilizations, because simulated civilizations don't have to deal with pesky encumbrances like "making chronological sense". A simulated civilization neither has to start low tech to become high tech, not does it have to persist for arbitrary aeons into the timeless depths of the cosmos until it dies out. The IRL Grabby simulator can just go "Uhhh, today I feel like starting at the Hypernegentropic Noosphere stage of civilization and continuing until the discovery of Sanguomaxtic Inversiololology, then I'll turn it off".

Assuming we are in a simulation, I don't think we can draw really any conclusions about our simulators, including whether they're Grabby or not. We have literally no evidence at all about that layer of reality except that they simulated us. I can think of countless reasons why they would simulate other Grabby's--maybe they want to simulate a war, or how history would have unfolded differently, etc.--but they're all worthless because we know nothing at all about our simulators.

And as a bonus to "why weren't we born into a Grabby civ at its peak", you can add "why am I not an 80kg blog of hydrogen somewhere in the middle of a star like the vast majority of matter in the universe?". This is all hitting up on the confusing and confused field of Anthropic Reasoning, all of whose results seem to depend quite a lot on the reference classes that we're considering. You also get hilarious results like Adam and Eve being able to hunt by just precommiting really hard to having sex (Adam says he will impregnate Eve and start all of humanity if a deer does not appear right this second in front of him, if he does impregnate her, then they are the first humans among trillions, an unbelievably unlikely position, therefore it must be the case that a deer appeared and he didn't impregnate Eve right then and there, which would merely make them the only humans to ever exist, a much less unlikely position).

I would seriously doubt any results we obtain from anthropic reasoning until the whole field gets cleared up of all this weirdness. The meditator in me would also protest that these results really depend on the existence of a "person" as an indivisible entity, which doesn't really exist...

Here are some fun lectures on anthropics by Nick Bostrom:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=oinR1jrTfrA

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8kqP1GX1K5E

And as a bonus to "why weren't we born into a Grabby civ at its peak", you can add "why am I not an 80kg blog of hydrogen somewhere in the middle of a star like the vast majority of matter in the universe?".

That would prevent you from being an agent which is capable of observing that it is in a universe. Realizing that life is much more likely to occur on planets is what starts you down the path of, if not rejecting the Copernican principle, at least refining it.

You also get hilarious results like Adam and Eve being able to hunt by just precommiting really hard to having sex (Adam says he will impregnate Eve and start all of humanity if a deer does not appear right this second in front of him, if he does impregnate her, then they are the first humans among trillions, an unbelievably unlikely position, therefore it must be the case that a deer appeared and he didn't impregnate Eve right then and there, which would merely make them the only humans to ever exist, a much less unlikely position)

I don't think I've ever seen anyone seriously suggest that anthropic reasoning works causally like this. I think once you condition on the known information of Adam's commitment, there is no contradiction any more.

Same as the Drake's equation. The impossibility of accurately estimating any of the key parameters makes it useless

Drake's equation has so many sub-factors built in. I hate when people take it seriously.

I agree with your points 1 and 2, but not 3. Knowing the distribution of all civilizations tells us the probability of other aliens, given that we are born early and don't see others. I agree it's surprising that we weren't born later, but given that we weren't, it's likely that there are others being born around the same time as us.

I do think your point 5 has merit, It's pretty similar to the simulation hypothesis. But in that case, it doesn't really matter what we do anyways.

I think it's hard to really say "given that we were born early and don't see others" when the original premises make that impossible for us to determine. We're already surmising godlike alien beings who will conquer and populate galaxies; it can't be that difficult for them to fool us. I think the simulation argument or one like it is inevitable and defeats the original conclusion.

I agree it's likely we're in some kind of simulation, but I'm not sure if that changes anything in terms of expected future observations. We are still early and alone in our universe, whatever level of simulation it happens to be.

Why would they need to fool us?

Well, the religion I follow has an answer to that one. Godlike beings who value agency want to prepare their children before giving them the same godlike power. Therefore they set up a test of sorts, meant to prepare their children morally and sort out the ill-prepared.

Another possibility would just be for kicks and giggles. Maybe there's a planetary development reality show they all tune into. Maybe they just like watching primitive species evolve--who needs videogames when you have the power to accomplish virtually anything near-instantly in reality?

Grabby aliens are likely not very Godlike and would not want to give us the same Godlike power. They just want our resources. They're probably just going to come and kill us.

You seem to have completely missed the point of what grabby aliens are. They are aliens who expand aggressively in all directions at near the speed up light, consuming all available resources in the universe.

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Mass and the energy of the sun, which is the eventual limiting factor for an interstellar civilization. (Realistically, any civilization limited by anything less wouldn't be capable of interstellar travel in the first place)

They wouldn't be spreading across the galaxy for spices, gold, and women.

I'm not sure you understand what I'm saying. In this scenario we are the grabby aliens coming into our own. I also find it unlikely that the grabby aliens wouldn't be godlike--it's been billions of years. We already would appear godlike to cavemen, and the distance between grabby aliens and us is much larger than the distance between us and cavemen.

In this scenario we are the grabby aliens coming into our own.

In what scenario? I don't understand what you're talking about. My comment was in response to yours about not being able to see aliens.

I also find it unlikely that the grabby aliens wouldn't be godlike--it's been billions of years. We already would appear godlike to cavemen, and the distance between grabby aliens and us is much larger than the distance between us and cavemen.

Because, unlike us, they would be very focused on expanding aggressively and would have found a very efficient way of doing so, which would likely be done by purpose built machines, not humanlike beings.

Ah ok. Well those are both pretty plausible. I think even if they mostly use machines, they still probably heavily outnumber us, though.

Which religion is this?

There's an (I think) old SMBC comic that goes something like this:

Priest: People believe in an inherent light and goodness to the world. Perhaps this is true, and there is some entity greater than we can imagine who is doing good in the world.

Skeptic: OK...

Priest: In conclusion, the doctrines of the 3rd Evangelical Orthodox Church are exactly correct.

The religion is LDS, but I have a slightly nonstandard view of our doctrine, and I don't even believe my original post--I was just using it to argue against the Grabby Aliens model. So it's just a fun coincidence; it's pretty far from what we actually believe. Even if I did believe what I was saying (instead of just making an argument using the original argument's premises) I would expect my post to be the furthest thing from convincing because it's so incredibly speculative as to be worthless.

The whole point of grabby aliens is not epistemic but propagandistic – same as with rationalists and certain statistical methods and very low probabilities multiplied by large numbers; it's a fitting aesthetic to slip a message in. The point is, we must grab the Universe by the... clusters before the Eridani Chinese do so; which they luckily cannot for the moment on the account of them being non-existent (or not advanced enough), but who knows for how long. I like the idea of space colonization and agree with Hanson that it ought to be advanced with rhetorics, but outright massaging the truth still rustles my jimmies. It is overwhelmingly likely that no aliens exist, because life is simply very, very hard. I keep referring to Koonin's argument and have yet to find any refutation. Life is hard. What merits explanation via the Anthropic principle is not us being alone, but us being at all.

(In fact I like space colonization specifically because we are alone; not only is it safer since no Dark Forest logic, but the downside of us going extinct, assuming consciousness has inherent value, is that much greater).

It doesn’t matter what the distributions of early civilizations is, because how individuals are born is a more relevant, powerful, and potentially accurate use of Outside View

Perhaps but both are essentially worthless, Outside view is another insidious meta-level «tool for thought» that's actually a tool for molding them in a shape amenable to rhetorical interventions. If you assume growing block universe, a perfectly cromulent cosmology for these purposes, all this disappears; non-existent individuals do not find themselves anywhere.

Why shouldn’t we be alone in the universe? Someone declares it arbitrarily unlikely because so many trillions of planets

A steelman of that could be made with the following chain of reasoning.

  • The Universe, the one we are living in, even if it was the only one; Is arbitrarily large. Very very very large.

  • There are a finite number of types of matter, energy, and their combinations and derivatives.

  • There are only so many ways they naturally arrange.

  • Given the arbitrarily large space, it is not all that unlikely that certain combinations could repeat.

  • That repetition includes combinations of matter, energy,{and physics primitives} that arrange into life and consciousness.

  • Howsoever narrow your definition of life is, the universe is larger.

I don't really buy the above because there are also an arbitrarily large number of ways to arrange {physics primitives}.

This whole thought experiment is trying to multiply epsilon and infinity and see which wins. Hence my other comment on the whole mental masturbatory aspect of discussions about this topic.

Why shouldn’t we be alone in the universe? Someone declares it arbitrarily unlikely because so many trillions of planets, except actually we have no idea what ‘the odds are’ and unless you believe a priori that they’re definitionally infinite then they could quite possibly be infinitesimally small.

That's not the only basis for the grabby aliens theory. Hanson has argued before that we really are alone in the universe, and his grabby aliens theory still says that sentient life is extremely rare. The grabby aliens theory also explains why we are so early in the lifetime of the universe. If we were truly alone, it would be very unlikely that we would have appeared so early.

If we were truly alone, it would be very unlikely that we would have appeared so early.

That's just more Anthropic principle reasoning. If we were truly truly alone, it'd have been very unlikely that we would have appeared at all, and therefore our existence necessitates speculating about multiverses with a vast number of brunches/bubbles (like Koonin does). The difference between scenarios where life is frequent enough for >1 conscious species to exist at the same time, and where we are alone early in history, is very tiny compared to the actual magnitude of uncertainty.

On top of that, we don't know the a priori distribution of opportunities for the emergence of life over time.

I concede this is an improvement on the default Fermi frame.

It seems rather difficult to figure out how likely various replicators "spontaneously emerging" from nucleotide soup is, given the ridiculously large number of configurations, and the plausible complexity of all the intermediate interactions and machines. Enumerating all of the plausible replicators is (only vaguely) reminiscent of counting all the wacky turing machines in the busy beaver problem. So I don't believe that number at all, you could totally imagine a "replicator" that barely works in specific contexts slowly evolving or something.

Figure 12-6 shows that at most ribozymes could spontaneously originate, but not a coupled replication-translation system (the DNA-protein world)

Why couldn't ribozymes evolve into dna-protein interactions? That seems very plausible. Once you have replication and selection going, you can explore complexity much faster - and in a directed way, as existing pressures and increases in complexity can push you towards randomly acquiring a bit of the complex thing, which is in turn more useful, and then develops more, etc.

This has definitely been deeply analyzed somewhere in the literature or something

That said, "life is just really hard" is as plausible as universal aliens

So I don't believe that number at all

That's your right of course but in the final accounting I'd take his word over yours.

you could totally imagine a "replicator" that barely works in specific contexts slowly evolving or something.

Why couldn't ribozymes evolve into dna-protein interactions? That seems very plausible.

Then where is the evidence for that wondrous mechanism? Or for it being workable, even if inefficient?

I like the turn of phrase once used by Land in his «Hell-baked» (on an adjacent topic): «machinery extant, or even rigorously imaginable». We can imagine pretty wild stuff, even perpetual motion engines or FTL travel, but it is not clear if your imagination is rigorous by the standards of current biomolecular knowledge. Often things that have been totally unworkable only become obviously unworkable and wild in retrospect; but that doesn't mean we should confuse the degree of our uncertainty about mechanisms and the probability of those things being workable. We do not know the bounds yet. We know the fundamental laws, though.

The entire chapter 11 of the book is devoted to walking through assumptions people can make for the world of plausible common ancestors of the DNA-based life that are substantially much simpler than LUCA or distributed-LUCA, and inherent inconsistencies of those models. In chapter 12 lies the reasoning for why we end up empty-handed when looking for very simple replicators and why the transition ought to have been that sharp. It begins with what sorts of replication can work at all, and the conditions for very basic protein motifs already ubiquitous in the inferred LUCA genome, such as the P-loop. Then it addresses the most simple model of all, RNA world:

Eigen’s theory revealed the existence of the fundamental limit on the fidelity of replication (the Eigen threshold): If the product of the error (mutation) rate and the information capacity (genome size) is below the Eigen threshold, there will be stable inheritance and hence evolution; however, if it is above the threshold, the mutational meltdown and extinction become inevitable (Eigen, 1971). The Eigen threshold lies somewhere between 1 and 10 mutations per round of replication (Tejero, et al., 2011); regardless of the exact value, staying above the threshold fidelity is required for sustainable replication and so is a prerequisite for the start of biological evolution (see Figure 12-1A). Indeed, the very origin of the first organisms presents at least an appearance of a paradox because a certain minimum level of complexity is required to make self-replication possible at all; high-fidelity replication requires additional functionalities that need even more information to be encoded (Penny, 2005).

The crucial question in the study of the origin of life is how the Darwin-Eigen cycle started—how was the minimum complexity that is required to achieve the minimally acceptable replication fidelity attained? In even the simplest modern systems, such as RNA viruses with the replication fidelity of only about 10–3 and viroids that replicate with the lowest fidelity among the known replicons (about 10–2; Gago, et al., 2009), replication is catalyzed by complex protein polymerases. The replicase itself is produced by translation of the respective mRNA(s), which is mediated by the immensely complex ribosomal apparatus. Hence, the dramatic paradox of the origin of life is that, to attain the minimum complexity required for a biological system to start on the Darwin-Eigen spiral, a system of a far greater complexity appears to be required.

…Indeed, comparative-genomic reconstructions of the gene repertoire of LUCA(S) point to a complex translation system that includes at least 18 of the 20 aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (aaRS), several translation factors, at least 40 ribosomal proteins, and several enzymes involved in rRNA and tRNA modification. It appears that the core of the translation system was already fully shaped in LUCA(S) (Anantharaman, et al., 2002).

…So an inevitable (even if perhaps counterintuitive) conclusion from the comparative analysis of ancient paralogous relationship between protein components of the translation system is that, with the interesting exception of the core ribosomal proteins, all proteins that play essential roles in modern translation are products of a long and complex evolution of diverse protein domains. Here comes the Catch-22: For all this protein evolution to occur, an accurate and efficient translation system is required. This primordial translation system might not need to be quite as good as the modern version, but it seems a safe bet that is must have been within an order of magnitude from the modern one in terms of fidelity and translation rates to make protein evolution possible.

The unique property of RNA that makes it a credible—indeed, apparently, the best—candidate for the central role in the primordial replicating system is its ability to combine informational and catalytic functions. Thus, it was extremely tempting to propose that the first replicator systems— the first life forms—consisted solely of RNA molecules that functioned both as information carriers (genomes and genes) and as catalysts of diverse reactions, including, in particular, their own replication and pre- cursor synthesis. This bold speculation has been spectacularly boosted by the discovery and subsequent study of ribozymes (RNA enzymes) […] All this progress notwithstanding, the ribozyme polymerases that are currently avail- able are a far cry from processive, sufficiently accurate (in terms of the Eigen threshold) replicases, capable of catalyzing the replication of exogenous templates and themselves. Enzymes with such proper- ties appear to be a conditio sine qua non for the evolution of the hypothetical RNA World. Besides, even the available ribozymes with the limited RNA polymerase capacity are rather complex molecules that consist of some 200 nucleotides and could be nontrivial to evolve in the prebiotic setting.

An estimate based on the functional tolerance of well-characterized ribozymes to mutations suggests that, at a fidelity of 10–3 errors per nucleotide per replicase cycle (roughly, the fidelity of the RNA-dependent RNA polymerases of modern viruses), an RNA “organism” with about 100 “genes” the size of a tRNA (80 nucleotides) would be sustainable. Such a level of fidelity would require only an order of magnitude improvement over the most accurate ribozyme polymerases obtained by in vitro selection. This might be an approximate upper bound of complexity on ensembles of co-evolving “selfish cooperators” that would have been the “organisms” of the RNA World. Even under the best-case scenario, the RNA World hardly has the potential to evolve beyond very simple “organisms.” To attain greater complexity, invention of translation and the Protein Breakthrough (the relegation of most catalytic activities to proteins) were required. […] The main general point about the evolution of translation is that selection for protein synthesis could not have been the underlying cause behind the origin of the translation system. To evolve this com- plex system via the Darwinian route, numerous steps are required, but proteins appear only at the last steps; until that point, an evolving organ- ism “does not know” how good proteins could be. As discussed in Chapter 9, many situations exist in which evolution seems to exhibit some foresight capability; however, these cases are effectively based on extrapolation, whereas, in the case of translation, there is nothing to extrapolate from. […] Thus, the only conceivable route for the emergence of translation seems to be exaptation: Intermediate stages in the evolution of the translation system must have been selected for functions other than protein synthesis. [no exaptation model makes good sense.]

natural flow reactors etc.

Only after a great deal of this review he gets to that lower bound of initial complexity.

I admit that the likelihood of him being wrong is a hell of a lot more than 1 to -1000th, but there is good reason to state that figure without caveats as the best estimate for the likelihood of abiogenesis in a single Hubble volume, given all we know.


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