I miss all of the posts about transhumanism, the future of politics/law, medical science, etc on the old forum. I'm interested in writing some posts on these topics, and happy to do research, but a bit low on ideas at the moment. Anyone have prompts or posts they've been thinking of writing to share? Happy to collaborate or edit as well.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
TheDag 1yr ago
I want to get my thoughts on the future of totalitarianism/collectivism in order, given new or improved technologies and social technologies and other tendencies that are currently coming. I suppose I could phrase the question as "will humanity as a whole adopt new forms of social organization, and will they be abhorrent to me?". Some trends that I suspect could become worse:
People being increasingly online, divorced from their physical surroundings, anonymized and atomized and drowned in useless information.
The dilution and possible disappearance of western nations and their complete replacement by cosmopolitan societies-of-convenience.
The further domestication of man through urbanization, infantilization, safetyism, the elimination of the private sphere, micromanagement of the economy, complete surveillance and tracking.
Declining standards of living in the west due to economic inefficiencies, state mismanagement and plain old decadence, and how people will adjust or be adjusted to them.
-- How do we define performance enhancing drugs? Historically the tests and justifications have been legality, negative side effects, and combining the two to say other competitors shouldn't be forced to take X to keep up. As medical science advances, to what extent will these arguments become irrelevant or old fashioned? Is WADA doing any kind of work towards new standards over time? Is the public drifting towards laxly tested sports versus highly tested sports? How do athletes doing medical tourism for eg stem cell treatments fit in?
-- How will future security cameras defeat the inevitable "deepfake defense" and maintain the ability to serve as conclusive evidence in court? I'm going after a gang of kids who vandalized a house we own, and I have decent camera shots of them, but a sufficiently skilled photoshopper could have done them, how do you get beyond a reasonable doubt?
-- How common are major and minor aesthetic procedures across young people in different countries, and how have aesthetic and cultural preferences changed in cultures where such procedures are more common? Already around me I see more and more Instagram face, and I find it unattractive, is that because it's naturally unattractive, because it's unoriginal and uncanny, or because it's culturally signifying that we wouldn't get along in the same way one of those clever joke t shirts would?
Those are ideas kicking around my head where I feel I lack the expertise to say anything, but I'd like to read someone as smart as you think about them.
How will future security cameras defeat the inevitable "deepfake defense"
Even if fakes become indistinguishable from real footage, it'll still remain valuable. After all, there are plenty of forms of evidence we accept today that are even easier to fake.
Eg. we accept witness testimony, even though just lying is even easier than photoshopping. So I think we'll just see the same standards applied: we'll trust footage on the basis of things like whether you have a motive to frame those particular people etc. So it's still going to be stronger evidence than, say, just reporting that you saw them, since doctoring footage would require actual malice on your part, while you could have been mistaken if it was just your recollection. And it should also be noted that just being indistinguishable from a fake "from the pixels" doesn't make it impossible to distinguish in general: like all lies, you're opening up yourself to contradictions if there are other reliable pieces of evidence to compare with (eg. if the kids have an alibi, or if your footage differs from your neighbours in terms of things like expected shadows / ambient light etc for the same time, you could be caught out). Even if no such evidence happens to exist, you can't reliably know that in advance, and so the fact that you're implicitly opening yourself up to prosecution in turn should it be wrong makes your footage more credible.
There are also probably ways to improve this further should such claims become more prevalent. Eg. cameras handled by third party companies that archive the realtime footage and provide a documented and consistent chain of custody for the evidence: faking footage in such a system would require a lot more technical knowledge.
Feel free to ask me about IPEDs, there are many interesting ones.
Now regarding your question, one should observe that the property of being a drug is contingent, and therefore the question of the legality or (di)incentivisation of Image and Performance Enhancers apply to everything, including innate genetics advantages (nature), and specific environmental enrichments and behaviours (nurture) and even the "in-between" of nature and nurture, such as the so called critical-periods.
About Nature, it is well known that many of the world champions in sports have specific genetic breeding/mutations (e.g. probably for Usain Bolt)
About Nurture, The science of behavioural and environmental performance optimizations is evolving in real time. Some things have evidence for benefits, e.g resistance training your legs leads to an acute testosterone release that will optimize the subsequent anabolicity of your arms muscles. A competitive athlete that lacks this niche erudition, will not be competitive eventually. However as with the rampant Universal Mediocrity of this timeline, no athlete on earth has ever attempted to combine all relevant niche optimizing behaviours.
Meditation brings neuro/synaptogenesis, but many behaviours/enrichments have mostly unknown effects, e.g. one really of the frontiers of realms is the ASMR. ASMR is scientifically the only externally inducible tactilo-auditive synesthesia that can be experienced by normal human beings. In addition to its interest in the field of studying qualias, like meditation is could be an atypical nootropic/nocitropic with unique performance altering properties.
About critical periods, well few know that some are actually reversible, for example basic epigenetic methylation induced by HDACs allow adults to develop an Absolute pitch.
So How do we define performance enhancing drugs?
I don't see an original answer, IPEDs definition is in the name, it's tautological. Is an IPED any drug (note we could define co-IPEDs) that enhance Image or "performance" AKA any desired behavioural metric. Therefore the scope is larger than what people have in mind, e.g. increasing your ability to love human beings (how many, how intensely, how long, how flexibly and how easily) could be seen as an IPED.
A co-IPED, would be a drug that become useful or maximally useful when concomitant to a behaviour(s) and/or even aforementionned critical periods.
As for the legality of IPEDs, one should distinguish between the legalisation for professionals/athlete and for the general public.
As for competitive athletes, the pros are:
Can improve their healthpan, lifespan and career-span.
Can improve their performance, therefore the show is (generally) more enjoyable for the public and for the athlete (many animes shows many sports with imaginary supra-human perfornance as an entairtainment). This is something I would like to see.
Alter the distribution/inequality of talent. There would be much more top performers, AKA more would reach a similar plateau.
speculative: would enable new sports? (e.g Imagine if we could make humans live underwater (cf famous rat study breathing when filled with a fluid), fly, etc)
other pros I'm too lazy to think about.
the cons are:
for drugs:
side effects risks therefore
possibly reduced healthspan, lifespan and career-span.
escalation to always wanting more IPEDs, hence reducing the health/perf ratio
other cons I'm too lazy to think about.
for nurture:
hypothetically some behaviours become too complex or costly, hence increasing talent distribution inequality and unhapiness.
The athlete like many professions can be seen as having an utilitaristic budget and indeed we could afford to alter the healthspan and lifespan of athletes negatively, to an extent.
And then we enter in a classic allocation tradeoff optimization problem.
E.g we could compromise and allow IPDEDS as a parallel league, therefore you would either be a regular athlete or a transhuman athlete and they would not play together (by default).
This has cons (split the talent pool) but still would be a net benefit in many sports.
The other questions is if we allow IPEDs, which one and how much (rationning)
The use of anabolics such as steroids has diminishing returns (yet bimodal) regarding health/vs performance benefits (IIRC it shows the potent retardation of mankind when you realize testosterone supplementation worldwide would save more lives than the current criminal de facto stigma on TRT, let alone depressions).
Therefore I would be for allowing up to a max. The max would indeed not be a dose, but take into account the massive endogenous testosterone production inequalities and the body capacitance.
However many IPEDs have mostly beneficial health effects (don't remember about low dose EPO though), e.g. probably apply to ALCAR, BPC-157, growth hormone if taken young, (and antioxidants if we consider performance enhancing over career-span)
Finally, one should understand that the regulation/controls for doping are broken and can't really work.
The biggest barrier to doping isn't anti-doping controls.. it is of course the extreme scarcity of humans being pubmed erudite.
I have seen many atypical anabolics that have not even a single mention on the whole reddit website nor a wikipedia page.
Even among the popular unpopular anabolics, such as the insect anabolics ecdysteroids, there are no control for them IIRC. Let alone for fungal anabolics (used in the Cow industry).
IIRC even regular anabolics like growth hormone and long ester steroids, have latent durable IPED effects and are "undetectable"
Messi is probably the #1 in the world because he took growth hormone therapy. That's not the only reason, but probably a necessary reason.
As for the legality of IPEDs on regular human beings, well as with most things with serious consequences, the legality should be conditional on the obtention of a diploma, after positively answering a quizz proving that the user understand said consequences and current known unknowns (like we should do for voting in "democracies").
Despite homeostasis, the use of drugs often has permanent effects on the human body, it's just that they are often low-observable, not necessarily insignificant.
The legality could mandate the concomitant use of protectors/mitigators, such as HCG for testosterone.
One striking example of permanent consequences is Melatonan-II, which simply makes you black.
The mere possibility that it is possible to fabricate evidence does not usually create reasonable doubt. After all, it is possible to fabricate all sorts of evidence, from testimony to physical evidence. Of course you never know what a jury will say, but you would generally need at least some evidence that the evidence was fabricated. That's why evidence of Mark Fuhrman's use of racial epithets was admissible in the OJ Simpson trial: it corroborated (albeit very, very weakly) the defense claim that the evidence was planted.
Sure, but we aren't far away from a world where deepfakes are consumer off-the-shelf tech. Hearsay is probably the better historical parallel: we don't allow people to just say "Oh, X said he did it" outside of very specific exceptions, because it's too easy to fake. Photo and video evidence isn't far away from ending up in the same place, where it will be trivially easy to fake. Will that work in 100% of cases? No. But I'm curious how security companies are thinking about how to preserve the usefulness of their product.
But that would still be a world in which 99.99% of videos are real. Someone could, of course, deep fake a liquor store's video in order to falsely implicate someone in a robbery, but unless there is evidence that someone had a motive to do so, why would they? And the analogy to hearsay doesn't really work, because hearsay is excluded not simply because it is too easy to fake, but rather because the original declarant is not subject to cross-examination, and so there is no way to examine the reliability of his statement. Indeed, the fact that I can lie on the stand about what you said (i.e., it is easy for me to fake the evidence of your statement) is irrelevant to the hearsay exclusion, because I am subject to cross-examination re whether I have faked the evidence. After all, if I testify, a) "Joe said that he robbed the bank" and b) "Joe said that thought the dead guy was sleeping with his wife." neither claim is inherently more or less likely to be a fabrication by me. But #a is admissible as an exception to the hearsay rule (or IIRC, not hearsay at all under the federal rules), but #b is not.
Regardless, there is an interesting (and refreshingly brief, for a law review article) discussion of the issue here which you might find interesting; the author argues for raising the standard for admissibility of such evidence.
I was just now reading through old Motte posts and I found this comment thread, which I think was a pretty good one. Maybe not exactly what you're looking for.
Nah I’d actually say I’m more on the left than right, and personally I find the modern conception of ‘right’ to be almost explicitly against any sort of articulated vision. Modern rightism seems like a negative or destructive (as in negating) ideology. Not that their ideas are all bad especially with our modern extravagance, but I rarely see any right wing ideas for building.
I guess I would be curious to see a steel man of that.
I find the modern conception of ‘right’ to be almost explicitly against any sort of articulated vision. Modern rightism seems like a negative or destructive (as in negating) ideology. Not that their ideas are all bad especially with our modern extravagance, but I rarely see any right wing ideas for building.
This and the similar ask by @Chrisprattalpharaptr in the CW thread make me think this must be a misunderstanding because of the common description of the right as "conservative" and thus they must be primarily concerned with placing the world in a temporal bubble that prevents all change positive or negative. I don't really call myself a conservative or really anything in particular but I do find myself defending conservatives pretty consistently, in my head this because I have surrounded myself with progressives and have very few actual interactions with the right wing and that the default left aligned cultural forces pervasive on the internet and corporate world feed me a constant drip of slightly irritatingly bad left wing positions and practically not irritating bad right wing positions that I don't seek out.
My steelman of the right/conservatism is that they genuinely think that our traditional values are how we have gotten to this place of historically unrivaled wealth, prosperity and equality and that if we maintain them things will simply continue improving. The 90s but everything costs 1/10th of what it did back then might as well be a utopia. Attempting to treat each other how the bible tells us to should have been able to produce much of the social progress we've had over the years without the need for vilification, which is probably why rightists are so fond of accusing leftists of operating on the unacknowledged framework of Christianity laundered through the enlightenment.
That you see rightists as purely opposing/negating leftist ideas is like viewing the staff that repairs an industrial factory as purely opposing/negating because rather than improving the factory they spend all their time preventing the progress of rust and decay. Sometimes yes, there is a way to improve the functioning of the factory but there are also many ways to leave it in ruin and prevent the good work that it does. Sometimes the conservatives have trouble differentiating a call to try replacing the dangerous water heater with a more advanced model from a call to replace a perfectly fine water heater with non-functional tube that has "water heater" written on it in crayon and that is where a functional left is vital but the left seems to very very direly underestimate just how fragile this whole thing is.
Conservatives see leftists as people who have this one quick trick to get around doing the hard part of actually improving society. How much money and human suffering has the left thrown at trying to solve things like homelessness? If we had just done nothing are you actually sure that we'd be worse off?
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Notes -
I miss all of the posts about transhumanism, the future of politics/law, medical science, etc on the old forum. I'm interested in writing some posts on these topics, and happy to do research, but a bit low on ideas at the moment. Anyone have prompts or posts they've been thinking of writing to share? Happy to collaborate or edit as well.
I want to get my thoughts on the future of totalitarianism/collectivism in order, given new or improved technologies and social technologies and other tendencies that are currently coming. I suppose I could phrase the question as "will humanity as a whole adopt new forms of social organization, and will they be abhorrent to me?". Some trends that I suspect could become worse:
People being increasingly online, divorced from their physical surroundings, anonymized and atomized and drowned in useless information.
The dilution and possible disappearance of western nations and their complete replacement by cosmopolitan societies-of-convenience.
The further domestication of man through urbanization, infantilization, safetyism, the elimination of the private sphere, micromanagement of the economy, complete surveillance and tracking.
Declining standards of living in the west due to economic inefficiencies, state mismanagement and plain old decadence, and how people will adjust or be adjusted to them.
What does the future hold in store?
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Feel free to talk to me, I have erudition and curiosity in all those topics, especially medical science.
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-- How do we define performance enhancing drugs? Historically the tests and justifications have been legality, negative side effects, and combining the two to say other competitors shouldn't be forced to take X to keep up. As medical science advances, to what extent will these arguments become irrelevant or old fashioned? Is WADA doing any kind of work towards new standards over time? Is the public drifting towards laxly tested sports versus highly tested sports? How do athletes doing medical tourism for eg stem cell treatments fit in?
-- How will future security cameras defeat the inevitable "deepfake defense" and maintain the ability to serve as conclusive evidence in court? I'm going after a gang of kids who vandalized a house we own, and I have decent camera shots of them, but a sufficiently skilled photoshopper could have done them, how do you get beyond a reasonable doubt?
-- How common are major and minor aesthetic procedures across young people in different countries, and how have aesthetic and cultural preferences changed in cultures where such procedures are more common? Already around me I see more and more Instagram face, and I find it unattractive, is that because it's naturally unattractive, because it's unoriginal and uncanny, or because it's culturally signifying that we wouldn't get along in the same way one of those clever joke t shirts would?
Those are ideas kicking around my head where I feel I lack the expertise to say anything, but I'd like to read someone as smart as you think about them.
Even if fakes become indistinguishable from real footage, it'll still remain valuable. After all, there are plenty of forms of evidence we accept today that are even easier to fake.
Eg. we accept witness testimony, even though just lying is even easier than photoshopping. So I think we'll just see the same standards applied: we'll trust footage on the basis of things like whether you have a motive to frame those particular people etc. So it's still going to be stronger evidence than, say, just reporting that you saw them, since doctoring footage would require actual malice on your part, while you could have been mistaken if it was just your recollection. And it should also be noted that just being indistinguishable from a fake "from the pixels" doesn't make it impossible to distinguish in general: like all lies, you're opening up yourself to contradictions if there are other reliable pieces of evidence to compare with (eg. if the kids have an alibi, or if your footage differs from your neighbours in terms of things like expected shadows / ambient light etc for the same time, you could be caught out). Even if no such evidence happens to exist, you can't reliably know that in advance, and so the fact that you're implicitly opening yourself up to prosecution in turn should it be wrong makes your footage more credible.
There are also probably ways to improve this further should such claims become more prevalent. Eg. cameras handled by third party companies that archive the realtime footage and provide a documented and consistent chain of custody for the evidence: faking footage in such a system would require a lot more technical knowledge.
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Great ideas ty! I'm not sure I qualify as extremely smart, but in my experience a small amount of research goes a long way on topics like this.
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Here's your blog post about IPEDs:
Feel free to ask me about IPEDs, there are many interesting ones.
Now regarding your question, one should observe that the property of being a drug is contingent, and therefore the question of the legality or (di)incentivisation of Image and Performance Enhancers apply to everything, including innate genetics advantages (nature), and specific environmental enrichments and behaviours (nurture) and even the "in-between" of nature and nurture, such as the so called critical-periods.
About Nature, it is well known that many of the world champions in sports have specific genetic breeding/mutations (e.g. probably for Usain Bolt)
About Nurture, The science of behavioural and environmental performance optimizations is evolving in real time. Some things have evidence for benefits, e.g resistance training your legs leads to an acute testosterone release that will optimize the subsequent anabolicity of your arms muscles. A competitive athlete that lacks this niche erudition, will not be competitive eventually. However as with the rampant Universal Mediocrity of this timeline, no athlete on earth has ever attempted to combine all relevant niche optimizing behaviours.
Meditation brings neuro/synaptogenesis, but many behaviours/enrichments have mostly unknown effects, e.g. one really of the frontiers of realms is the ASMR. ASMR is scientifically the only externally inducible tactilo-auditive synesthesia that can be experienced by normal human beings. In addition to its interest in the field of studying qualias, like meditation is could be an atypical nootropic/nocitropic with unique performance altering properties.
About critical periods, well few know that some are actually reversible, for example basic epigenetic methylation induced by HDACs allow adults to develop an Absolute pitch.
So How do we define performance enhancing drugs?
I don't see an original answer, IPEDs definition is in the name, it's tautological. Is an IPED any drug (note we could define co-IPEDs) that enhance Image or "performance" AKA any desired behavioural metric. Therefore the scope is larger than what people have in mind, e.g. increasing your ability to love human beings (how many, how intensely, how long, how flexibly and how easily) could be seen as an IPED.
A co-IPED, would be a drug that become useful or maximally useful when concomitant to a behaviour(s) and/or even aforementionned critical periods.
As for the legality of IPEDs, one should distinguish between the legalisation for professionals/athlete and for the general public.
As for competitive athletes, the pros are:
Can improve their healthpan, lifespan and career-span.
Can improve their performance, therefore the show is (generally) more enjoyable for the public and for the athlete (many animes shows many sports with imaginary supra-human perfornance as an entairtainment). This is something I would like to see.
Alter the distribution/inequality of talent. There would be much more top performers, AKA more would reach a similar plateau.
speculative: would enable new sports? (e.g Imagine if we could make humans live underwater (cf famous rat study breathing when filled with a fluid), fly, etc)
other pros I'm too lazy to think about.
the cons are:
for drugs:
side effects risks therefore
possibly reduced healthspan, lifespan and career-span.
escalation to always wanting more IPEDs, hence reducing the health/perf ratio
other cons I'm too lazy to think about.
for nurture:
The athlete like many professions can be seen as having an utilitaristic budget and indeed we could afford to alter the healthspan and lifespan of athletes negatively, to an extent.
And then we enter in a classic allocation tradeoff optimization problem.
E.g we could compromise and allow IPDEDS as a parallel league, therefore you would either be a regular athlete or a transhuman athlete and they would not play together (by default).
This has cons (split the talent pool) but still would be a net benefit in many sports.
The other questions is if we allow IPEDs, which one and how much (rationning)
The use of anabolics such as steroids has diminishing returns (yet bimodal) regarding health/vs performance benefits (IIRC it shows the potent retardation of mankind when you realize testosterone supplementation worldwide would save more lives than the current criminal de facto stigma on TRT, let alone depressions).
Therefore I would be for allowing up to a max. The max would indeed not be a dose, but take into account the massive endogenous testosterone production inequalities and the body capacitance.
However many IPEDs have mostly beneficial health effects (don't remember about low dose EPO though), e.g. probably apply to ALCAR, BPC-157, growth hormone if taken young, (and antioxidants if we consider performance enhancing over career-span)
Finally, one should understand that the regulation/controls for doping are broken and can't really work.
The biggest barrier to doping isn't anti-doping controls.. it is of course the extreme scarcity of humans being pubmed erudite.
I have seen many atypical anabolics that have not even a single mention on the whole reddit website nor a wikipedia page.
Even among the popular unpopular anabolics, such as the insect anabolics ecdysteroids, there are no control for them IIRC. Let alone for fungal anabolics (used in the Cow industry).
IIRC even regular anabolics like growth hormone and long ester steroids, have latent durable IPED effects and are "undetectable"
Messi is probably the #1 in the world because he took growth hormone therapy. That's not the only reason, but probably a necessary reason.
As for the legality of IPEDs on regular human beings, well as with most things with serious consequences, the legality should be conditional on the obtention of a diploma, after positively answering a quizz proving that the user understand said consequences and current known unknowns (like we should do for voting in "democracies").
Despite homeostasis, the use of drugs often has permanent effects on the human body, it's just that they are often low-observable, not necessarily insignificant.
The legality could mandate the concomitant use of protectors/mitigators, such as HCG for testosterone.
One striking example of permanent consequences is Melatonan-II, which simply makes you black.
VoiceOfLogic
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The mere possibility that it is possible to fabricate evidence does not usually create reasonable doubt. After all, it is possible to fabricate all sorts of evidence, from testimony to physical evidence. Of course you never know what a jury will say, but you would generally need at least some evidence that the evidence was fabricated. That's why evidence of Mark Fuhrman's use of racial epithets was admissible in the OJ Simpson trial: it corroborated (albeit very, very weakly) the defense claim that the evidence was planted.
Sure, but we aren't far away from a world where deepfakes are consumer off-the-shelf tech. Hearsay is probably the better historical parallel: we don't allow people to just say "Oh, X said he did it" outside of very specific exceptions, because it's too easy to fake. Photo and video evidence isn't far away from ending up in the same place, where it will be trivially easy to fake. Will that work in 100% of cases? No. But I'm curious how security companies are thinking about how to preserve the usefulness of their product.
But that would still be a world in which 99.99% of videos are real. Someone could, of course, deep fake a liquor store's video in order to falsely implicate someone in a robbery, but unless there is evidence that someone had a motive to do so, why would they? And the analogy to hearsay doesn't really work, because hearsay is excluded not simply because it is too easy to fake, but rather because the original declarant is not subject to cross-examination, and so there is no way to examine the reliability of his statement. Indeed, the fact that I can lie on the stand about what you said (i.e., it is easy for me to fake the evidence of your statement) is irrelevant to the hearsay exclusion, because I am subject to cross-examination re whether I have faked the evidence. After all, if I testify, a) "Joe said that he robbed the bank" and b) "Joe said that thought the dead guy was sleeping with his wife." neither claim is inherently more or less likely to be a fabrication by me. But #a is admissible as an exception to the hearsay rule (or IIRC, not hearsay at all under the federal rules), but #b is not.
Regardless, there is an interesting (and refreshingly brief, for a law review article) discussion of the issue here which you might find interesting; the author argues for raising the standard for admissibility of such evidence.
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I was just now reading through old Motte posts and I found this comment thread, which I think was a pretty good one. Maybe not exactly what you're looking for.
Nah I’d actually say I’m more on the left than right, and personally I find the modern conception of ‘right’ to be almost explicitly against any sort of articulated vision. Modern rightism seems like a negative or destructive (as in negating) ideology. Not that their ideas are all bad especially with our modern extravagance, but I rarely see any right wing ideas for building.
I guess I would be curious to see a steel man of that.
This and the similar ask by @Chrisprattalpharaptr in the CW thread make me think this must be a misunderstanding because of the common description of the right as "conservative" and thus they must be primarily concerned with placing the world in a temporal bubble that prevents all change positive or negative. I don't really call myself a conservative or really anything in particular but I do find myself defending conservatives pretty consistently, in my head this because I have surrounded myself with progressives and have very few actual interactions with the right wing and that the default left aligned cultural forces pervasive on the internet and corporate world feed me a constant drip of slightly irritatingly bad left wing positions and practically not irritating bad right wing positions that I don't seek out.
My steelman of the right/conservatism is that they genuinely think that our traditional values are how we have gotten to this place of historically unrivaled wealth, prosperity and equality and that if we maintain them things will simply continue improving. The 90s but everything costs 1/10th of what it did back then might as well be a utopia. Attempting to treat each other how the bible tells us to should have been able to produce much of the social progress we've had over the years without the need for vilification, which is probably why rightists are so fond of accusing leftists of operating on the unacknowledged framework of Christianity laundered through the enlightenment.
That you see rightists as purely opposing/negating leftist ideas is like viewing the staff that repairs an industrial factory as purely opposing/negating because rather than improving the factory they spend all their time preventing the progress of rust and decay. Sometimes yes, there is a way to improve the functioning of the factory but there are also many ways to leave it in ruin and prevent the good work that it does. Sometimes the conservatives have trouble differentiating a call to try replacing the dangerous water heater with a more advanced model from a call to replace a perfectly fine water heater with non-functional tube that has "water heater" written on it in crayon and that is where a functional left is vital but the left seems to very very direly underestimate just how fragile this whole thing is.
Conservatives see leftists as people who have this one quick trick to get around doing the hard part of actually improving society. How much money and human suffering has the left thrown at trying to solve things like homelessness? If we had just done nothing are you actually sure that we'd be worse off?
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