site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28723 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I've been agnostic, rather than atheist, for most of my life. My argument was that life is too complex, especially with how organs work, for there not to be someone planning it. I guess the best word for my beliefs would be deist, but I only learned the term recently.

Anyway, I just read an essay by Yudkowsky and I'm now convinced there is almost certainly no God. This depresses me because I want there to be a God.. which is to say, an unmoved mover at the beginning of time that is sentient. The idea that something at the beginning of time was unaffected by the rules of cause and effect is still plausible to me, but is there any reason left to assume it was sapient? I'd appreciate help with this, because I want to convince myself there may be a God.

If God were the programmer of a simulation that you live in, how would it look different that the God we know?

You can't go back to who you were before. You'll have to live with your newfound (lack of) belief.

That one almost got me. He certainly is a clever evangelist.

He writes an entire post about evolution not having a telos and that humans like to see intentionality where there is none, then ends with this (and I realise it is at least partly tongue-in-cheek):

Well, more power to us humans. I like having a Creator I can outwit. Beats being a pet. I'm glad it was Azathoth and not Odin.

But if evolution is Azathoth, there is no outwitting it. It is pure, raw, potentiality and humans are part of the universe where Azathoth is the motive force. This is like an ant exulting over outwitting the homeowner that hasn't put down powder to prevent them entering the kitchen - as soon as the superior power notices you, it's the end of you.

Besides, it's not Azathoth you need to outwit, it's Nyarlathotep, and he's much, much smarter, meaner, more devious, and nastier.

The idea that something at the beginning of time was unaffected by the rules of cause and effect is still plausible to me, but is there any reason left to assume it was sapient?

Sure, just read Genesis 1:27…

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

And Hebrews 13:8…

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

And of course, there’s John 1:1-5…

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

If you hold the authority of the Bible to be true, which it is, then there’s ample evidence to believe in a living God that exists apart from time and is the creator of everything. His existence is beyond our comprehension, which takes a reasonable man with humility to appreciate. You want there to be a God. Of course! That’s because God has written himself into your/our hearts. From Romans 2:14-15…

For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them…

So why be depressed? Take joy in the fact that God exists, despite what one internet blogger claims in his own foolishness.

If you hold the authority of the Bible to be true, which it is

I think you're begging the question here. If @Conservautism believed the bible were true, he wouldn't have explained why he's now an atheist. You need to explain why the Bible is true (the weaker part of your case) rather than why the truth of the Bible implies that God exists, which you spent a rather unnecessary number of words on.

Oh, I stopped believing the Bible to be true when I was 10, but I continued to believe in God because I thought the complexity of life implied a designer. I think that's what they used to call deism.

Agnosticism is a method. A/Theism is a choice about personal morality, and whether to outsource it.

For God, like everything else, the devil is in the definitions. If you want to believe in god, change definitions until you have one that works for you. In one sense, there is no god. In another, everyone has their own god. In a third, god is created by the belief and institutions of the religion.

Who or what do you serve? How do you spend your time, energy and money? What causes do you kill and die for? What gives you meaning and purpose?

For a rough functional definition, that's your god.

A/Theism is a choice about personal morality, and whether to outsource it.

Strongly disagree here. I believe God to be good, but God doesn't define goodness. Morality is fundamental to reality itself.

I'd like to hear more. So far in my experience when people say that they're just talking about game theory.

Well let me preface this by saying I'm no philosopher, but also I don't believe philosophers have a monopoly on, or even a better-than-average understanding of, philosophy. They are no better at living moral principles than anyone else, and I consider firsthand experience a much better path towards actual truth than any amount of reasoning in a vacuum.

I believe morality is like math in that both exist and can be true or false. You can change your axioms, redefine two to mean three etc., but in the end moral conclusions inevitably follow from moral premises due to the nature of logic itself. Given the same premises, two independent people should always reach the same moral conclusions.

Further, I believe the premises themselves are also objectively correct or incorrect. Some are simply true, others simply false. Maybe a better way to put it is that some are ordered and others disordered, and some correlate with things universally recognized as good while others do not.

The logical equivalent is modus ponens. If you don't accept modus ponens, you don't accept it, but then the rest of logic is cut off to you. You won't accomplish anything. Perhaps, in a vaccuum, it is equally valid to accept or reject modus ponens, but to me it is straightforwardly obvious that modus ponens is simple Truth as defined by reality itself.

I believe we can experimentally verify moral axioms. Like with modus ponens, accepting a correct moral axiom will lead to more progress, growth, success, and sophistication in one's life and philosophy than rejecting it.

In the end I have to say this is mostly post-hoc justification, though, and my main reason for this belief is simple intuition. Certain beliefs--such as the belief that purposeless suffering is bad--feel just as objectively correct to me as any mathematical or logical proof.

For God, like everything else, the devil is in the definitions. If you want to believe in god, change definitions until you have one that works for you. In one sense, there is no god. In another, everyone has their own god. In a third, god is created by the belief and institutions of the religion.

OP said they wished they could believe in God. But this, while attempting to give advice, is basically presuming God is dead, which defeats the purpose.

If a person came to you and said "I really wanted to believe in quantum mechanics" after a particularly devastating article debunking it, it'd be very strange to tell them "well, quantum mechanics is whatever you want so long as you define it thus" (although this is true if you're a comic writer). Presumably they want to believe in something actually real that quantum mechanics points to and it does them little good to redefine quantum entanglement to mean the unseen connections that bind all people.

What argument that Yudkowsky made did you find convincing?

I admit I'm saying this from a perspective of finding the essay you linked banal and deeply uninteresting. It shows, I think, that it's from 2007 - it's a bit of sub-Dawkinsian New Atheist tat. Does there appear to be great chaos and cruelty in nature? Indeed there does! But we have always known this. The inference to God from nature was never premised on the idea that there is no evil in nature. On the contrary, evil spiritual forces and sin are also inferred from nature. No religion that I'm aware of asserts that this world must necessarily be a paradise, or that it cannot contain seeming chaos, orderliness, pain, or suffering.

You'd have to construct at least a basic syllogism to make that an argument against God - "If God exists, he would eliminate evil; evil exists; therefore God does not exist". We could jump straight into theodicy. But Yudkowsky doesn't seem to even offer that much? There just isn't any substance there.

But it sounds like something in Yudkowsky's essay really spoke to you, or hit on something you'd been asking yourself?

It's not that nature is cruel, but rather, that it's nonsensically cruel that's gotten to me. The artifacts that come from evolution truly being random.

The Fundamental Question of Rationality is: "Why do you believe what you believe?", or alternatively, "What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?" - LessWrong

If you find a mechanical wristwatch sitting on the side of the road, and when you take it home you discover it only ticks forward fifty-eight minutes every hour, you don’t believe it to have been imperfectly made to begin with; you believe its perfection to have become corrupted through circumstance.

Yud’s whole telos is using the scientific method (and Bayes Theorum) for everything in life. That’s the core of rationalism. The core of the scientific method is that once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how absurd or intricate, must be the truth. Science is perpetually trying to falsify all assumptions, all explanations, so that the truth may be seen in its naked glory.

But in that essay he spoke about a Judeo-Christian God, without the specifics of theology of any single religion, sect, or cult within that wide umbrella. He referenced a belief in a loving, immanent, benevolent God who deliberately used a cruel process of death and suffering to refine slugs to apes, and apes to humans, for the purpose of proclaiming His glory forever after death. And he did a fine job of destroying those cosmologies which embrace this patent absurdity.

Ken Ham, the premier creationist, does the same, using the same evidence.

Yes, Eliezer Yudkowsky has more in common with Ken Ham than either do with the theologians of ecumenical denominations, whether Judaic, Christian, or Hindu. Both Ham and Yud believe in a specific historical sequence (heh) of events which led to the world we live in now. Both believe in, and proclaim loudly, the purposelessness of evolution, and both loudly proclaim it is not God who made the world a place of toothless elephants or fat humans.

But where Yud says it is only man which brings the light of intellect to the universe, Ham points to the very first part of the ancient Scriptures of his religion and says it was man, not God, whose choice brought death into the world, who wrought entropy across the surface of the Earth and ended the perfection of a loving God’s garden.

Yudkowsky did not show that the artifacts of purposelessness inherent in an entropic and random world must be the result of a vast regression of chaos to the beginning of time; he didn’t see a need to falsify the only alternative which also fits the evidence.

Where he sees a Bronze Age civilization’s myths and just-so stories, Ham sees a miraculously preserved historical narrative documenting in detail a fall from a perfect world created by omniscience, resulting in the world we can see and measure, and dinosaur fossils we can dig up as evidence of this true history.

The mere existence of the “problem of pain” argument, however artfully phrased and carefully evidenced, is not in itself a proof of the nonexistence of the God of the Bible.

Now, I know I’m not going to convince anyone on this forum (of all places) to trust Ken Ham over Eliezer Yudkowsky. What I’m doing is making it crystal clear that Yud has handily falsified the weakman argument. The strongman is nowhere to be found in that essay.

Does there appear to be great chaos and cruelty in nature? Indeed there does! But we have always known this.

We have also always known that there is great apparent design in nature too, which people have taken to mean a designer with some sort of experience (since that's the easiest way to conceptualize the work being done).

If you look at the arms race between predator and prey, adaptations made to local conditions and other such things it's easy to see both chaos and design. You can blame the chaos on some sort of plan from the designer (in my religious tradition it's because - what else - humans fucked up) but you have to explain both the variety and how organisms seem to fit their niche.

It's probably especially important given the timescales certain religions claim (which are relatively truncated).

You're right, this is simplistic thinking (pointed out by Charles Taylor that "Darwin refuted the Bible" was said in the 1890s by a Harrow schoolboy; 2010s atheists weren't exactly breaking new ground) but I've actually gone on a journey similar to the midwit meme here: "Evolution disproved religion" -> "actually, it was probably a complex interplay of material and ideological factors involving the Protestan..." -> "Evolution disproved religion".

I don't think this has an impact on certain other philosophical arguments from God, but it undermines one of the most intuitive reasons to believe in one and when you start going down that road...eventually you may find that you don't need an alternate explanation. This is where people like Graham Oppy end up: most of the philosophical arguments are at least hard to conclusively settle but naturalism works without the need for additional supernatural entities and forces.

Yudkowsky makes much of "this aspect and that aspect of nature is cruel" but why do we think that? It's all part of the push and pull of varying forces. What is it about humans that makes us pass value judgements like "this is cruel, this is evil, I cannot accept a god that includes this as part of the world"?

That's the itch that is never scratched by atheism. We can reduce our feelings about cruelty down to "in the end, it's because what is 'cruel' is painful, and all organisms want to avoid pain and find pleasure, it's an instinctual drive" and get rid of morality in that way. But I think few people find "There is no morality, it's just what makes us go 'yuck' and we are now too smart and modern to give the disgust reaction any right over our behaviour".

If disgust reaction is no reason to go "homosexuality is wrong", it is also no reason to go "elderly elephants dying of starvation is cruel".

This Yudkowsky essay is about precisely this question.

Convincing yourself that God exists - or convincing yourself that you have convinced yourself - won't make there be a God. There just is one or there isn't. All you'd be doing is lying to yourself.

Wanting to believe things is a type error. Beliefs aren't about what you want, they're about what you think is true.

I think the correct word is hope. You can hope something is true but its desirability shouldn't affect your actual beliefs one way or the other.

While in the vernacular it's common to use Agnostic to mean "I don't really know but I think it's possible" and Atheist to mean "I believe there is no God" I think you'll find that when pushed hard to really clarify exactly what Belief and Knowledge are that most of what we think of as knowledge claims are in fact belief claims. I do not "know" that say (purely for example), the Chicago School of Economics is true. But I may perhaps "believe" that it is. Or to be even more pedantic, I may assign a 90% chance in my head that I think it's true, a 5% chance it's flawed but mostly true, and leave the remaining 5%.

I do not "know" that I am not a brain in a vat in a jar experiencing a simulation. But I don't find this particularly likely, and am happy to say that I believe my toothpaste exists and should be applied before bed. Even though if sufficiently pushed I'd be stuck arguing that, yes, it's true. I can't be literally 100% confident about my toothpaste the same way I am that A = A. This 'mere belief' state of affairs has yet to stop me from brushing my teeth before bed.

In that sense the vast majority of Atheists are, more precisely, Agnostic Atheists, and are happy to describe themselves as such. They do not Know, but they lack assertive belief that God exists. Much like how I lack a belief in the efficacy of Mercantilism, even if I can't write a PhD paper explaining why. Atheists may vary in the particulars. One may give God a 10% chance, which isn't enough for him to believe in a positive existence. Another may say God's likelyhood is less than 1%! I have even seen someone describe himself as an Asymptotic Atheist. His credence towards Gods existence approached infinity but never quite touched "cannot possibly exist".

Actual "God does not exist, 100%, stop" Atheists do exist. They'll have uncommon definitional arguments about how all sufficient definitions of God are inherently incoherent or contradictory. But these are rare indeed, and functionally arn't all that different than a mainstream Atheist.

Perhaps you will find your argument for God and change your mind. Perhaps you will look back at this moment as your crisis of faith and in the end it was the testing fire you needed to harden your spirit into a faith a strong as steel.

I can't prevent you from doing that. But what I can say is that even losing all faith that God exists, the world is still beautiful. Painfully, overwhelmingly, & shockingly beautiful. It's the beauty of a cherry blossom caught in the wind between branch and ground. We travel in the now between the Scylla of pre-existence and the Charybdis of our species eventual end. In this precious moment we exist and are lucky enough to be conscious of it. There is no reason for our morals to atrophy or our marvel of the natural world to diminish because what we do now is only heightened in importance by it's transience. There is a joy to be had in the self regard as one made in the image of God. But when that disappears it does not stay a God shaped hole in the heart. Rather, I regard every piece of civilization as a precious jewel against the void from which we came. Humanity as universe's greatest happenstance. We could have stayed as brutes. We could have been born and winked out of existence. Humanity was once reduced to nearly a thousand people!

But today an atheist can go to the cathedral in Cologne and tremble at how passionate humanity was even during poorer times. And a believer can know his doctor is an atheist and realize that his doctor regards his life as something that once extinguished is gone forever, and that his doctors will fight like hell to help him get back to good health as a result. And we can all build something together and marvel at this incredible world we all live in.

There is no shortage of arguments intended to pull you back to a faith in a Creater Deity. But if you should wonder once more about the other side then here:

If you want the old argument, then read De Rerum Natura De Rerum Natura. On The Nature of Things. And realize that these notions about the world are by no means new.

If you want the new argument, then read On the Big Picture, by Sean Carrol. And really understand how we got to this point.

Finally, the rationalists are sometimes cringe. But even in their cringe they have a point. You said "I want to convince myself there is a God". I ask you to consider instead, their Litany of Tarski. Contrast your desire to believe in something you find comforting vs whether you can can find real comfort in belief in something you know just isn't so. And consider instead your desire to believe what is true. That:

If the box contains a diamond, I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond; If the box does not contain a diamond, I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond; Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.

Thank you so much. I wish I had more to say than that, but you have been a huge help.

I kept thinking that I should respond to this with some other longwinded paragraph of text. But you are right. and I'll keep it simple. I'm happy that I could help. Anyone wrestling with these questions deserves nothing less.

Do you really want the unmoved mover at the beginning of time? Are you fine with it existing outside of time? Is it ok if it's galaxy brained beyond human comprehension?

I'm agnostic myself, but I put enough stock in the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. Would you settle for every possible mind of every size and shape that does not logically contradict loving you- doing so from somewhere in the multiverse and the multiverse containing a mathematically complete set of such things all loving one another?

The unmoved mover at the beginning of time is difficult for us to comprehend conceptually, but (a) our comprehension of the primordial laws of the universe is limited, so all we’re saying is “that doesn’t seem legit” and (b) it certainly doesn’t seem less realistic conceptually than an all-loving, all-knowing God who cares personally about the life of every human, who has a strong personality and who sent himself down to earth to pass down some arbitrary rules for human society at his leisure a couple of thousand years ago.

We can really delineate several categories of claim.

(1) There is ‘something’ that is ‘out there’. Trivially true, it’s very unlikely we’re the most intelligent or advanced beings in the entire universe, sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, there are probably lifeforms with a much deeper understanding of the underlying laws of reality than ourselves, yadda yadda.

(2) The simulation hypothesis is plausible; our current primitive computing after a century of development is already capable of extraordinary things, after another thousand or million years of development simulating an entire universe seems completely feasible.

(3) The Abrahamic (or equivalent) omni-x God is real. This is the most radical claim, since even the simulation hypothesis involves, somewhere down the chain, the organic emergence of the intelligence that created the simulation. Knowing everything that has ever happened or will happen, in any multiverse/form of reality, forever, existing outside of time, loving everyone and yet still caring deeply about humans and a specific little planet called earth where he really cares tremendously about whether I eat lobster, this is less believable, aesthetically at least.

I mean, sure, it can exist outside time. But I thought the multiverse was just a trope in fiction, like time travel.

Science now posits that our space-time continuum is one of many “branes” floating in a pseudospace, and occasionally bumping into each other causing Big Bangs within them.

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. - Shakespeare

Sure. Imagine you write a computer simulation, with little creatures running around, doing whatever. By your definition of god, you are the god of the universe you see on your screen.

Now, imagine you make your little critters carry some gene-like information that determines their physical characteristics and behavior, make them eat and die and reproduce, then add random noise to their genes.

Your simulation now has evolution; your code for reproduction (and the RNG) is exactly the "alien god" Yudowski talks about. That doesnt make you any less of the creator of these creatures.

You could even design your simulation such that you could put your finger on the scales, without it being possible to tell from within the simulation. Just add save states, or design some way of bending the RNG to your will. The "intelligent design" hypothesis is now true in the universe you created.

Finally, imagine that you make your simulation increasingly more complex - simulate cells, then molecules, then atoms, then subatomic particles, at greater and greater scales - until your simulation literally describes our universe. Your simulation still has evolution - in fact, at the point of convergence, the literal exact same evolution that we see in our universe - but you're still god to your creation.

Now, as the creator, you're omnipotent and could thus choose to manifest to your subjects exactly like the christian god, or any other god humans believe in. Hell, perhaps you decide to mess with the humans, and act as all known dieties at different times to different people, just to see what happens.

Sure, simulating out entire universe might not be possible with the physics we have at hand. But, just as while the physics in the first iteration of your simulation wouldn't permit one of your critters building an identical simulation-in-a-simulation, that doesn't mean that you couldn't do it - the physics in our universe are more powerful than theirs, so it was a simple task for you - so could the physics of a universe outside of ours make it possible to simulate our universe.

There's nothing about evolution that's incompatible with any god, by the very definition of 'god', because the god could just exist in a meta-universe where the physics of this universe don't apply.

People can be convicted of murder even when a body has not been found, sometimes on the basis of circumstantial evidence and the presence of a strong motive, means, and opportunity (and no alibi). The claim of the Holocaust (defined as the deliberate killing of the great majority of the 4+ million predominantly Eastern European Jews who vanished from the Earth between 1939 and 1946) is supported by this logical exercise.

Hitler's loathing for Jewry long predated his rise to power; his government had the ability and opportunity to engage in a genocidal campaign; his government controlled both the territory from which Jews were taken and on which they were killed; the prewar Jewish population of Eastern Europe was well documented; there is no evidence of the Jews who disappeared ever reappearing anywhere else; the number who disappeared was well out of proportion with the equivalent rate in the gentile civilian population of the occupied territories; Stalin had no particular affection for Jews, but the fact that he promoted many to positions of power in the Eastern Bloc after WW2 is incongruent with having immediately prior committed anti-Jewish genocide on his part.

Coupled with the centrality of antisemitism to Nazi ideology, it is highly likely the majority of the Jews who disappeared were deliberately killed by Germany (and its ideological allies in occupied lands) between 1941 and 1945. Therefore, while the precise methods and location of the deaths are valid topics of historical inquiry, it would appear very likely that the Holocaust (as I define it above) did occur.

he promoted many to positions of power in the Eastern Bloc after WW2

After WW2? Like Solomon Mikhoels?

Stalin's anti-Semitism aside, "Holocaust didn't happen, Hitler didn't kill millions of Jews, but Stalin did" is a weird position to take. Well, not weird ideologically, "we didn't do it, but you deserved it" is a common stance among midwit supporters of various atrocities, but I am surprised when people try this on the Motte.

After WW2? Like Solomon Mikhoels?

Jews were pretty common in the immediate postwar Romanian, Hungarian, Polish and even East German governments over which Stalin presided. Some like Pauker and Slansky (although in the latter case it’s questionable whether it was antisemitism) were purged I suppose, but many weren’t. In any case, the fact that they were allowed in power at all even from 1947-1952 suggests it’s unlikely that Stalin genocided Jews.

"Stalin killed millions, or at least over a million, Jews" is basically a necessary argument as a part of the great statistical rejigging operation that's required to be even in the ballpark of answering the "Where did the Jews go?" question. It's not a particularly good argument - it presumes a genocide that we basically have zero proof of in the form of witness statements, camps etc. whatever proof we have for the Holocaust - but the argument that Soviets that rapidly assimilated a huge number of Jews that aren't shown in their statistics runs into even more problems once aliayh from Soviet Union/Russia becomes possible and vast amounts of Jews (religous, ethnic, whatever) or people with any connection to Judaism start to migrate to Israel.

We have witness reports of UPA Ukrainians, Keelhauled White Russians and other such groups being shipped to GULag after the war. We don't have anything remotely similar about Jews.

I think that the debate over the historicity of the Holocaust is a good opportunity to discuss the fundamental nature of how we know what we know.

Holocaust deniers are right when they say that most people just accept the mainstream theories without thinking too much about them.

However, in my experience at least, Holocaust deniers are mostly wrong when they depict themselves as open-minded seekers of truth. Again, at least in my experience, most Holocaust deniers believe that it did not happen with just the same sort of religious ardor that they criticize in others.

Holocaust deniers are right that there are various questionable aspects about the mainstream narratives.

However, I am not convinced that they themselves present a more convincing theory. And this is important because, I think, in any major historical event that involved large numbers of people, it will always be possible to pick holes in any given theory.

After any event that involves thousands of people, there will probably be some people afterward who either lie about what happened for personal gain or are genuinely misremembering / hallucinating things because they have mental issues.

However, this does not mean that the event did not happen.

When trying to figure out the truth of something like the Holocaust, I think that we should realize that there is not and probably never will be, barring the invention of time travel, any near-perfect theory that covers all the evidence in a way that makes everyone satisfied.

Given that there is no near-perfect theory, and certainly no perfect theory, the question then is what theory seems to be the most plausible.

For me, what seems more plausible?

  1. The Nazi regime, which openly hated Jews and praised political violence, and which was known for killing even their own former political comrades sometimes (the Night of the Long Knives), actually did wipe out much of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe during the time that they occupied those territories.

  2. The Nazi regime did not. The US and USSR and various European governments cooperated to create a hoax and perpetuate it all through the Cold War, and the various supposed witnesses are largely lying.

To me, #1 seems more plausible.

A similar line of thought can be extended to, for example, the John Kennedy assassination and 9/11. With major modifications, though. For example, it would have taken a much smaller group of people to kill John Kennedy than to kill several million Jews.

I find it much much easier to believe that the "official" story that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone is wrong than that the Holocaust never happened.

However, the point stands that just because the "official" theory has holes in it does not necessarily mean that any other theory is more plausible. One can pick holes in the other theories too.

Much of the debate over these kinds of historical questions boils down to people picking holes in the other side's theory while ignoring the holes in their own theory.

And unlike at least some people who question the "official" story of John Kennedy's assassination, Holocaust deniers rarely even bother to present a comprehensive alternative theory.

People who think that Oswald did not act alone at least often present some kind of theory to explain what happened. The CIA did it, or the anti-Castro Cubans, or the mafia, or some combination. Most Holocaust deniers, on the other hand, just pick holes in the mainstream theories without actually presenting a comprehensive theory of what they think happened.

As a side note, from what I understand, it did not even really take that many people to kill several million Jews, unless you count all the soldiers whose efforts were necessary to extend Nazis control into Eastern Europe to begin with.

Once the Nazis controlled those territories, the actual effort it would have taken to kill millions of Jews was quite small. A few thousand Einsatzgruppen soldiers, a few thousand camp personnel, and some railroad workers.

Holocaust questioners often argue "why would the Nazis have devoted so much effort to killing all those Jews in the middle of a war". And, even putting aside the fact that wanting to dismantle Jewish power was a major Nazi political aim, that question still makes little sense because the actual effort it would have taken to kill those Jews according to the mainstream theories was quite small.

I have done the math before of looking into necessary use of railroads, material, and soldiers and I figured out that even at the height of the Holocaust, the extermination campaign would have been using maybe about 1-2% of the total German war effort just on the East Front alone.

I do not feel like finding and posting the math right now, but anyone can do it themselves if they want to. For example, look at numbers for how many railroad cars per day it took to supply the German armies on the East Front and then compare them to how many railroad cars per day moving Jews to the camps would have required.

It is not hard for an authoritarian regime to round up and kill huge numbers of mostly unarmed people.

The Germans and Soviets both committed ethnic genocides and the Soviet dumped their portion on the Germans.

The Soviets deported the majority of unaccounted-for victims to the East while the Germans had the will and drive on paper.

Quite a number (far from the majority, but certainly more than would be expected for an avowed antisemite) Eastern Bloc communists that Stalin put in positions of authority in East Germany, Hungary, Poland Czecheslovakia and Romania immediately after WW2 were Jewish. If Stalin was the kind of person to genocide Jews, he probably wouldn't have done so. Markus Wolf was one of the most important figures in Soviet/East German intelligence for the entire history of the DDR and was Jewish. Again, this doesn't seem like the behavior of someone who would have genocided Jews. Stalin's actions regarding ethnic transfers and his hysteria about the 'doctors' plot' were the product of what one might call an 'HBD mindset', an awareness of group dynamics as a Georgian himself. But he did not display the particular contempt for Jews specifically that Hitler did.

An undocumented global diaspora of Jews occcurred as a result of extensive European antisemitism.

Immigration to Palestine/Israel before and after 1947 was thoroughly recorded. The same is true for immigration to the UK and US. Soviet Jewish communities would have noticed an influx of millions of otherwise unrecorded Jews streaming in during or after WW2; they did not. The Ashkenazi Jewish population of other countries is relatively well documented. There really isn't any good evidence that the Jews who vanished from Poland in WW2 ever reappeared anywhere else.

I don't know that I ever expected to be accused of declaring that my own people have unjust privilege on this board (if anything, it's usually the inverse!) but my point was that Stalin supposedly engaging in a secret genocide of regular Jewish civilians in Eastern Europe - as alleged by some Holocaust revisionists - is pretty ridiculous. The climate in the USSR in the crucial period 1940-1945 (actually well before peak Soviet antisemitism in 1952) wasn't indicative of an environment in which Jews were genocided by the Soviets.

is a bit like using Clarence Thomas as evidence that mass incarceration and widespread discrimination of poor Blacks didn't occur in the 80s and 90s

Widespread legal discrimination against poor African Americans didn't occur in the United States in the 1990s, mass incarceration as a result of tough-on-crime policies saw surges in the number of prisoners of all ethnicities in the US). There was absolutely antisemitism in postwar Eastern Europe - I mention elsewhere in this thread Ana Pauker, who was definitely forced out of office (and would have been executed had the big man not died) by Stalin for being Jewish with relatives in Israel, and for allowing Jews to leave Romania as Foreign Minister. There was indeed a well-documented pogrom in Poland in 1946! This was a return to the way things had long been for Jews in the region.

There's a far more parsimonious answer: they don't want to be found.

So they vanished, silently assimilating into the gentile population (ironically, as I have argued, this is an excellent argument against ethnic antisemitism), whereupon they were never heard from again. Even as the USSR disintegrated and emigration to Israel provided an escape hatch for the Soviet Jews who had remained aware of their Jewish identity, these people never raised a hand. As religious freedom returned in the postwar Soviet age, they never thought to visit a synagogue or reconnect with the Jewish community their ancestors had been part of for more than 2000 years. In forty years, they forgot they were even Jewish (meanwhile Conversos in the Iberian world took centuries to shed their Jewishness), such that today their children and grandchildren have no idea what they are. It seems unlikely, to say the least.

If you find the notion preposterous that the Poles, Finns, Ukranians, Estonians, Latvians, Belorussians, Volga Germans, Koreans, Greeks, Italians, Americans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims, Ostarbeiters, POWs, kulaks, etc. ad nauseam were all treated particularly harshly by Stalin, Beria, and the clique in charge of the USSR with forced resettlements in mortal-labor camps for everyone involved, but there was no similar action against Jews in the Pale of Settlement, despite being well within the Venn diagram of "Bourgeois nationalists" and "foreign elements," well, I don't think we can reach any shifting in priors because someone has a personal motivation in propagating their inherited culture at the expense of reason.

That, I’m afraid, is precisely my point. Every single one of the examples you cite is extensively documented. An alleged Soviet genocide of Jews is not. And in any case, it’s hard for me to understand what you’re arguing for. Are you suggesting the Soviets killed the Jews or silently (and more effectively than any other state in history) assimilated them? Both are false, but they’re very different accusations.

Even further, your notion that Jews in the USSR had effectively preferential treatment as a result of a nadir of antisemitism in the USSR during the critical period, despite reprisals against every other adjacent populace in the region

I don’t claim there was any preferential treatment, only similar treatment to the majority of those other ethnic groups, who were not subject to genocide even if they were subject to persecution.

More comments

it is within the realm of possibility that the Soviets had the means, motivation, and gall to attempt, if not succeed at such a fabrication.

compare Katyń Massacre, where Russians tried to frame Germans (events included Germans supporting war crime investigations and propagating info about actual war crime, for maximum irony)

(though I am really dubious whether they had either motivation, means or ability to do and succeed with Holocaust, I have seen no evidence whatsoever for that)

It is true that Soviets were to some extent anti-Jewish after Stalin purged many of the Jewish Old Bolsheviks. However, any argument that one can make for how the Soviets were anti-Jewish is true much more for the Nazis. However much anti-Jewish Stalin might have been, as far as I know there is no good evidence that he was anywhere close to having been as anti-Jewish as Hitler.

It is not out of the realm of possibility that the Soviets murdered a bunch of Jews during and right after World War 2, but given that the Nazis were like 10 times more anti-Jewish than the Soviets in their political rhetoric, it seems to me that if either of the two regimes killed millions of Jews, it is much more likely that the Nazis did than that the Soviets did.

I mean, for however anti-Jewish Stalin might have been, the fact is that his regime employed many Jews even after the purges. The same cannot be said, except maybe for a few isolated cases, about Hitler's regime.

Preventative purges of foreign nationals began in 1940.

1930’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD

I don’t think the history of the holocaust is any different than any other event in history. Most of it, for the lay public are believed without looking for evidence. Nobody’s out demanding proof of Lincoln actually being shot in Ford’s theater. Or whether Hamilton was shot by Burr in a duel.

For professionals, there are always journals, pictures, and physical evidence to seek, and tbh I’m not sure how closely the public perception of history matches what the average person thinks they know about history. I’m pretty sure large numbers of Eastern European Jews were killed by the Nazis. I’m not sure where the exact number lies, but I’m not sure an exact number matters. I’m also positive that a lot of the post war publicity around the even wasn’t just aimed at “killing people is bad” (which it obviously is) but in creating a founding myth for the new order of NATO and Atlanticist Allies, basically casting ourselves as heroes for fight genocidal maniacs and making the world safe for democracy and freedom. History, any history is complicated.

I’m not sure where the exact number lies, but I’m not sure an exact number matters.

I does. If one reduces the number of victims to under million and reframes extermination camps into working camps with terrible conditions in which it was easy to get executed and you know they happened to be in the pale of settlement that was the main battlefield of the war - suddenly it ceases to exist as a moral pillar and turns into - nazis are just communist but without scale and ambition ...

Well, yeah, which is why the most hardcore Holocaust deniers typically reframe casualty numbers to 320,000-600,000, they don't stick with 4 million because 4 million would still unambiguously be a deliberate genocide of Jews in particular.

The Nazi regime, which openly hated Jews and praised political violence, and which was known for killing even their own former political comrades sometimes (the Night of the Long Knives), actually did wipe out much of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe during the time that they occupied those territories.

The Nazi regime did not. The US and USSR and various European governments cooperated to create a hoax and perpetuate it all through the Cold War, and the various supposed witnesses are largely lying.

If you are trying to assess the prior probability you would want to consider the fact that the "official narrative" claims what were without a doubt the most unusual events in WW-II and perhaps the most unusual series events in all of human history. Sure, there has been "genocide" before, but the claims about millions of people being transported across a continent so they could be tricked into gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower, then gassed with Zyklon B, then buried, and then later unburied and cremated on open-air pyres within a few months, then reburied... It's hard to believe when you think about it fairly.

Or, this narrative was coarse atrocity propaganda, like the nearly identical "German corpse factory" propaganda in WWI. In contrast with that earlier atrocity propaganda, which the British admitted was a lie and apologized for after the war, Hollywood and the apparatus of Stalinist propaganda joined their efforts in engraining this atrocity propaganda as a quasi-religious, modern-day Exodus narrative exploited by the US for the purposes of denazification, the USSR, and of course above all the Jews.

To me, #2 seems much more plausible, and the lack of contemporary documentary evidence and physical evidence makes it much more so. The reliance on post-war witness testimony as evidence should be highly suspicious to anyone who appreciates how unusual the actual claims made by Holocaust historians are.

Witness testimony is notoriously unreliable, over 50% of the accused confessed in the Salem Witch trials and almost all who confessed were spared execution. The lack of documentary and physical evidence for these extraordinary claims is too glaring to be ignored by any reasonable person.

Edit: One more thing I want to add. An observation made by A. J. P. Taylor in The Origins of the Second World War discusses how in the immediate aftermath of WWI, the prevailing narrative placed singular war guilt on Germany with no room allowed for nuance. But, over time as tensions cooled from the immediate aftermath of the war, there were many historical revisions within the perspective of the causes for WWI that shifted far away from that original post-war narrative to where it stands today, which does not place all the war guilt on Germany. Taylor notes, in contrast, the narrative that congealed in the immediate aftermath of WWII remains completely unchanged decades later.

I find it believable that, in the same way there has been no revision to the completely black-and-white anti-German perspective on the origins of WW-II, there has likewise been no revision to the atrocity propaganda that is foremost used to justify that perspective. They are inexorably tied together. My point is that there were many incentives for the Holocaust narrative to take hold, and many incentives for it to remain, lest the perspective on the origins of WW-II become revised along a similar trajectory as our understanding of the origins of WW-I.

Moldbug said recently, paraphrasing, "everything you have been told about WW-II is a lie, except for the Holocaust." What are the chances of that statement being true? Very slim.

Sure, there has been "genocide" before, but the claims about millions of people being transported across a continent so they could be tricked into gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower, then gassed with Zyklon B, then buried, and then later unburied and cremated on open-air pyres within a few months, then reburied...

"across a continent" was usually just a few hundred kilometers and it's not like it would have been hard for a state that was supplying three million soldiers with food, ammunition, and replacement parts a thousand kilometers away from Berlin to move the Jews and the tiny amounts of stuff they were allowed to take with them even if it had been across a continent. "tricked into gas chambers" was actually "forced into gas chambers one way or the other, with maybe a fig leaf of plausible deniability to make it easier to control the victims".

Whether they tricked Jews into gas chambers or not, the Nazis had good pragmatic reasons for putting at least some veil of secrecy on top of what they were doing to the Jews. The German public were largely anti Jew as far as I know, but many would have been outraged by the idea of literally killing all of them. Also, Hitler was constantly hoping to reach a peace agreement with the Western powers, which would have been complicated had his solution to the Jewish question become unquestioned international knowledge.

The anti-German propaganda in WWI never accused them of anything even close to the scale of what the Holocaust is supposed to have been. It is harder to believe that the Allies would have bullshitted about something the scale of the Holocaust than that they would have bullshitted about something like supposed German atrocities in Belgium during WWI.

Also, as far as I know, the Holocaust was not even a major element of Allied anti-Nazi propaganda during WW2, that came later. So there is another difference which calls into question the supposed parallels.

A very plausible explanation for why the anti-German post-WW2 narrative has endured longer than the anti-German post-WW1 narrative is that simply put, the average person, whether a random peon or a member of the elite, just genuinely does feel that Hitler's government was more morally outrageous than the Kaiser's government.

"forced into gas chambers one way or the other, with maybe a fig leaf of plausible deniability to make it easier to control the victims".

If Treblinka "witnesses" were to be believed, they genuinely believed they were taking a shower. One of the few witnesses to Treblinka, a Jew, testified that he gave haircuts to the Jews inside the gas chamber and they didn't know they were going to be killed. Does that make any sense at all? No, but it's what he claims.

It is harder to believe that the Allies would have bullshitted about something the scale of the Holocaust than that they would have bullshitted about something like supposed German atrocities in Belgium during WWI.

We know Soviet investigators bullshitted 1.5 million people murdered at Majdanek in 7 gas chambers, months before they rolled into Auschwitz and made the exact same claims with the exact same body of evidence.

We know the Americans bullshitted about gas chambers at the Western camps they liberated. The Americans brought in Hollywood directors to film concentration camp footage, and in the film they submitted as evidence in Nuremberg they bullshited a homicidal gas chamber at Dachau. To the minimum credit of the Western Allies, they soon after abandoned all claims of gas chamber extermination in the camps that they liberated, and those claims only persisted in those camps liberated by the Soviets, where Western observers were denied access for investigation. Though, for years, the Dachau museum had a sign that bizarrely read "gas chamber disguised as a shower room -- never used as a gas chamber."

We can even see here that Simon Wiesenthal bullshitted about 5 million non-Jews being murdered in the Holocaust, in order to psychologically manipulate Gentiles into caring about Jewish suffering.

All of the things you have said the Allies wouldn't do, they absolutely did, and you grossly underestimate the capacity and motive for mass deception.

The German public were largely anti Jew as far as I know, but many would have been outraged by the idea of literally killing all of them. Also, Hitler was constantly hoping to reach a peace agreement with the Western powers, which would have been complicated had his solution to the Jewish question become unquestioned international knowledge.

These are also both points against a motive for the alleged operation. In Germany the euthanasia program was abandoned because of public unpopularity. The story goes, the Germans carried out their secret gas chamber extermination program purely out of racial hatred, at great risk during a time it was fighting a war for its own survival, and against all logic. Revisionists contend the "Final Solution" was the deportation of the Jews from the European sphere, and there's no real reason why they would have switched from deportation to secret gas chamber extermination. There is certainly no documentation pointing to a change in policy, and there's no strategic reason for it, and many strategic reasons it would have been a very bad idea.

whether a random peon or a member of the elite, just genuinely does feel that Hitler's government was more morally outrageous than the Kaiser's government.

You think the cart is driving the horse? Public opinion is molded by these grand narratives, and the Holocaust and gas chambers disguised as shower rooms is the biggest grand narrative to come out of WWII. That would be consistent with my suggestion that Holocaust Remembrance has been sacralized, in part, to prevent historical Revisions that would give a more balanced perspective of that conflict, and dare I say, attribute a measure of war guilt to the United States and Great Britain. That narrative was an essential part of de-nazification and it continues to be considered an important narrative in preventing re-nazification, at least according to its most zealous proponents.

Revisionists contend the "Final Solution" was the deportation of the Jews from the European sphere, and there's no real reason why they would have switched from deportation to secret gas chamber extermination.

There is no evidence for deportation because the vast majority of the pre-war Eastern European Jewish population vanished between 1941 and 1945, never to reappear. They didn't go anywhere, not to the Soviet Union (where Jewish communities noticed no great postwar influx), certainly not to Israel (where immigration records were well-kept1 and the majority of early immigration was of Arab Jews), and certainly not to the West (where again, immigration records and records in Jewish communities were well-kept). They never attempted to contact their lost relatives. The younger ones never tried to move back to the West or Israel after 1991 even though many would presumably have survived until then.

1 For example, approximately 120,000 Polish Jews made Aliyah to Israel between 1945 and 1948. The prewar Polish Jewish population was estimated at 3,000,000-3,500,000.

As @Stefferi says, there isn't a coherent revionist explanation for what happened to the extremely well-documented Jewish communities of Eastern Europe after WW2. Survivors undertook surveys of what remained in 1945 and 1946 and found the vast majority had died. This is evidenced by the fact that revisionists cannot really agree on whether the majority of Eastern European Jews either never existed in the first place, did exist but died in other ways that were not intentional genocide (unlikely given vast disparities in civilian casualty rates between Jews and gentiles even when controlling for geography) or did exist but 'left' mysteriously to the Soviet Union or elsewhere at some point between 1939 and 1946. Many believe in all three depending on what is convenient.

And there's an element of ridiculousness to some of the claims, too. The trauma of internment leading to exaggeration or even fabrication is one accusation, and one that has historical precedent. But the idea that all these Eastern European Holocaust survivors invented, out of whole cloth, dozens of extended family members, a half dozen dead siblings, dead uncles and aunts, dead children in some cases, when they were secretly only children or something seems truly absurd.

You could have replied in the original thread.

First, it is incorrect to say the 1.5 million figure was "never taken seriously". It was widely published in international newspapers. For millions of citizens internationally, they were hearing for the first time about "death factories" with gas chambers and crematoria where millions were murdered at Majdanek. And these weren't rumors or second-hand clandestine reports, they were claims that had been ostensibly proven by allied investigators after they conquered the camp. The entire narrative found believability with these 'investigations' from Madjanek, which preceded all others.

Secondly, as I've said, these reports and figures were submitted as evidence at the Nuremberg trials by Soviet prosecutors. So we can dismiss the claim the figures were "not taken seriously" , they were taken seriously in the international press and in the most important phase of the war crime trials. Majdanek guards were also indicted, convicted, and executed based on these wildly inflated, false claims.

The Soviet investigation of Majdanek, which claimed astronomically inflated death tolls and 7 homicidal gas chambers, stood alongside other Soviet-submitted investigatory reports on Auschwitz and the Katyn massacre at Nuremberg, the latter of which produced an investigation and eyewitnesses (!) that falsely blamed the Germans for the Katyn massacre. It so happens the signatories to the Katyn investigation were the same as the Auschwitz investigation, with the addition of the biological quack Lysenko as signatory to the Auschwitz "investigation."

The Biden Administration's Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism is Deborah Lipstadt, who is one of the most high-profile holocaust 'scholars' alive today. On the left is a 1944 New York Times article about "1.5 million murdered in Majdanek" and on the right is Deborah Lipstadt - in 1982 in the LA Times- claiming that the remains of 1.7 million Jews were found at Majdanek (note: she is actually endorsing the 1944 article in her own column). While you are completely wrong that "historians have never taken seriously the Soviet claim that 1.5 million people were murdered at Majdanek", you are correct that the claims have wildly varied - and precipitously declined throughout the decades. This is the consequence of an initial, false campaign of psychological warfare falling apart in the face of the documentary and physical evidence which was left behind at Majdanek, evidence which Revisionsits were able to point to in order to prove their case.

Of the latter, the most prominent if Rudolf Hoss' memoir where he writes about the use of gas chambers. This was long after his alleged mistreatment (which is also wrote about) in captivity, so it's hard to conceive of a reason why Hoss would lie.

Hoss's testimony was extracted through torture. He was in custody when his memoirs were written, and his memoirs were published by his captors. He also testified to things we know are completely false, like the claim that 4 million people were murdered at Auschwitz, which also stood as official "history" for decades until it was revised after the fall of the Soviet Union - with no impact whatsoever on the "6 million" number. The lack of contemporary documentation indicating any campaign of mass gassings is legendary, no documents have ever been found. Post-war "confessions" like that of Rudolf Hoss, extracted under torture by British interrogators, have been used as a substitute for contemporary documents, and it should be noted that your comment references no contemporary documents, whereas if such evidence existed you would surely cite that instead of the post-war confession of a witness who was subjected to physical torture.

In addition to two gas chambers in which Zyklon B was used

It would be helpful if you could cite any evidence that shows those two gas chambers were used to murder inmates with Zyklon B. The inconvenient fact for the Majdanek Museum is that all the witnesses cited different structures as being the center of gas chamber extermination, like the bathing facility which the Museum has now admitted conducted no homicidal gassings. So there's really no evidence at all for what you are claiming.

Lastly, you are ignoring the co-dependence of these claims. The Soviet investigations claimed 7 homicidal gas chambers, and witnesses pointed mostly to a real bathing and delousing facility as the center of mass murder. So 5 of those 7 are now admitted to have been false, including the facility which was the centerpiece of the original claims made by 'witnesses.' Any reasonable person would be suspicious that the final 2 are likewise false, and he should expect a reasonable amount of evidence to believe they were what the Soviets claimed. If I claim that 7 people were killed by a bear, but then I was exposed as lying about 5 out of 7 of those people, I should be expected to provide strong evidence that the last 2 people actually were killed by a bear.

Because the camp was so hastily abandoned in the face of the Soviet advance, the Nazis did not have as much time to destroy the camp as they did Treblinka, for instance.

And this is the only reason Revisionists "won" Majdanek. The evidence was captured largely intact, allowed Revisionists to find original construction orders and documents proving their theory. They were able to visit the actual structures and point out the impossibility that they were used for the purposes claimed by historians. It is notable that the ease with which Revisionists prove their case is proportional to the amount of evidence that is left behind, whereas unrevised claims about 900,000 deaths at Treblinka are only maintained because of the basic lack of any sort of contemporary evidence. If Majdanek were as thoroughly destroyed as Treblinka, it's likely the original Soviet investigation would remain intact as it has at Treblinka.

I feel like we get too many holocaust denial type posts which not too many people believe in and isn’t all that interesting.

But I am starting to wander if the right might develop some serious antisemitism going forward but I don’t believe it’s coming from holocaust denial atleast as the gateway drug.

I think it’s coming from a lot of leftwing ideology that the right is internalizing. It’s from the woke class system and disparate impact policy where I am not even sure where the Jews fit in the woke class pyramid - maybe the top or not even a part of it.

Identity politics would seem to not be good for the Jewish community in so far as being more successful as a group as applied to general whites means your racists bad person. Then normie whites start to look around and see people of Jewish descent way disproportionately powerful and likely even more powerful in culturally powerful areas. All the advantages normie whites are accused of having (which they don’t) are very strong in some Jewish communities. Then you look at say some leading places accusing you of white supremacy like CNN being Jewish run and suddenly a lot of antisemitism doesn’t feel like a conspiracy.

To conclude identity politics and a lot of their arguments expose the Jewish ethnicity in a way that pre-2008 American culture on race did not. If I am to be judged for my groups success then should that not even more strongly apply to Jews?

Hopefully, we can go back in time culturally.

I think it’s coming from a lot of leftwing ideology that the right is internalizing.

The ironic thing is that (directionally at least) i probably agree with our WN interlocutors more than most other users here do. A prospiracy of Jewish Intellectuals really is out there trying to subvert and destroy the West. Thing is that contra the Takismag crew and users like @SecureSignals, maintain that it aint the conservative voting to back Isreal who are providing aid and comfort to the enemy. Its the Marxists, the Socialists, the Intersectionionalists, and the grievance-mongers.

I think a lot of the latent antisemitism on the right was being masked for most of the last century by the popularity of dispensational theology. Now that dispensationalism is going out of style, and secularization has progressed to the point where even the right is being affected, you are seeing a lot of the antisemitism pop back up.

I think this probably overstates the influence of dispensationalism? As I understand it, dispensationalism never really made any headway outside of America, and even in America it was only ever a fringe, minority view? Dispensationalism was a minority within American Protestantism, much less Christianity as a whole.

(I wouldn't be surprised if it's now a majority in American Protestantism, given the collapse of the mainlines and greater prominence of Baptists and Pentecostals, but the growth of Catholics will still keep it down as a proportion of the whole.)

Keith Woods earlier this week got #BanTheADL as number 1 trending on Twitter, with even Elon Musk responding positively to Keith's posts and others from right wingers like this.

The ADL has gone too far, and I don't think the rank-and-file Left is going to go to bat to defend the ADL. The ADL have too contradictory of an ethos, being highly Woke when it comes to the West but radically right-wing and ethnonationalist when it comes to Israel. It opens them up to credible criticism from the Right with a Left that is not going to be eager to go to their defense.

Basically, the problem is that the behavior of the ADL opens them up to highly credible criticisms from both right wing and left wing anti-Semites, so their list of ideological allies is going to continue to grow thin.

I am likely picking up some thoughts downstream from that movement. I don’t get how they think promoting woke doctrines serve Jewish interests as I see those arguments as easily turned against them. Besides looking like hypocrites it would seem identity grievances should be something they would be afraid of spreading.

It’s from the woke class system and disparate impact policy where I am not even sure where the Jews fit in the woke class pyramid - maybe the top or not even a part of it.

Being Jewish counts for exactly zero in woke terms. If you're Jewish and light skinned or even medium-toned you're white (whereas a person with the same appearance who was Muslim might be "brown"). The fact that there's a lot of Jews espousing it doesn't have to do with wokeness favoring Jews; mostly it's about Jews being leftists. It wasn't good to be a Jew under Communism either (to be fair, it wasn't good to be anything under Communism), but that had a disproportionate number of Jewish supporters too. It's almost enough to make you question HBD.

Being Jewish ends up counting in woke terms sporadically. Whenever there's some right-wing antisemetic comment that happens, or even something that borders on being antisemetic or could be construed as being antisemetic through wild interpretation (like how Marjorie Taylor Greene's dumb comment got morphed by the left into being about "Jewish space lasers"), then the left always takes the opportunity to pounce and decry the right as antisemetic, and implies that Jewish people are oppressed by the Right. And then Jewishness gains a little bit of woke traction. But then it goes away again, mostly.

In invoking the oppression Olympics, blacks and Muslims are typically on the top of the hierarchy, followed by Jews and Asians, and whites always at the bottom. Meaning that anti-Muslim bias by jews will always get more attention than the other way around, which is almost always ignored. Trump being blamed for anti-semenitism , but some jews blamed for islamophobia, fits this model.

The baseline assumption for belief, for people who don't know a lot about Holocaust history, is that there is a coherent narrative that makes sense, the historians have consistently agreed on, and the historical evidence has consistently supported.

The problems with this mode of thinking are multiple, but the relevant one here arises when people are asked to evaluate specific parts of the narrative. It becomes a self reinforcing circle. Looking something like: Given that X happened it seems very likely that Y also happened.

Take 3 big Holocaust events that definitely happened. 1, 2, 3. Take one Holocaust event that definitely didn't happen. 4. Say that events 2 and 4 are equally evidenced. Except in the case of 4 there was, by chance, completely exculpatory evidence discovered. Can you still take event 2 as undeniably true?

Both events were equally evidenced. Eyewitness testimony by the hundreds. Both camps were liberated mostly intact. Memoirs written of the horrifying events that unfolded when hundreds of people were crammed into a small chamber to be executed. Infant children trampled under the panicking mass of soon to be slaughtered jews as their mothers wailed in absolute horror. Clawing at the walls, begging for mercy... Except in one case we know for 100% fact that it was all lies conjured up by some guy. Literally just made it all up. Not just that, hundreds of eye witnesses testified jews were being gassed to American investigators. Every single one of them lying.

I have a problem with this. For me, 2 now seems a lot less likely to be true. If 4 was false, but is otherwise exactly the same, the entire catalog of evidence for 2 should now be under serious scrutiny. Eyewitness testimony is no longer enough. You need hard physical evidence because it has been discovered that the bar for evidence that has been set can be met with nothing but lies.

But for people who believe in the narrative, not evidence, they can't do that. 1 happened, 3 happened... What are the odds 2 didn't happen? All the historians agree. All the mainstream. Not even Alex Jones would deny the Holocaust... 2 obviously happened or the Holocaust historians wouldn't say it happened.

I don't know how to better express it. As soon as you find 2 to be within the scope of scrutiny due to the similarity to the standard of evidence used to prove 4, you are a denier. It's no longer 6 million, which it never was. It's no longer 5.2-5.8 million. It's now around 4 million. Congrats. You are a denier. Have fun reasoning with people who, through a reality defying congruence of evidence manage to piece together that every single data point relating to jews from 1900's onwards reinforces the fact that German Nazis killed 6 million of them for ideological reasons between 1939-1945.

It's honestly not worth the effort. You start seeing things. Becoming crazy. Arguing about nothing with people who never looked at any evidence in the first place. The notion never entered their mind. To them it's just a feeling. A self reinforcing circle of things that had to happen.

Perhaps if you outlaid it in a way that gave reassurance and pointed to what you agree with. Maybe occasionally allude to the tragedy and antisemitism. It's always presented in a way that it feels like Part 1 of a series where ultimately I'm going to be led to believe nobody was gassed at all. Start with your conclusion and present evidence and counter-evidence.

The construction is too heavily in your favour currently, as if I'm being given a tour of a communist country by the regime. Go left here, point to this building on the right, talk to this baker, ...

This feels a little like the Eric Turkheimer argument against HBD. Where the actual truth value of HBD doesn't really matter because of the potential consequences of belief in it could be negative. The peculiarity of that view is that it pays no heed to whatever problems the anti-HBD narrative causes for whites.

I kind of care that Germans are painted as remorseless monsters that murder for sport in mainstream Holocaust propaganda. I find it kind of gross to see a people dehumanized in such a way. When the 'Bear Jew' is depicted as smashing a German soldiers skull in, and his actions are seen as righteous and jovial, I kind of get sick in my stomach.

To what end do I owe the mainstream reassurance, and of what?

I think the whole intention of the Bear Jew scene is to make you sick and uncomfortable. Tarantino knows that the Nazis are widely depicted as the great monsters of history and jews as their innocent victims. So he goes and creates a situation where the jews have the power and engage in needless cruelty, while the Nazi exhibits the noble virtue of courage. It's no accident that the scene includes the exchange about the Iron Cross. He could have included stuff to show the Nazi doing evil things so you felt better about him getting clubbed. But instead he showed him staring down death with bravery and resolve.

The point of this of course is not to make some grand point about shared humanity and how even the worst people have good aspects or anything like that. It's Tarantino. The point is to make you feel sick and uncomfortable because he thinks it's fun. And also to show brutal cruelty because he thinks that's fun too.

The movie is a revenge fantasy. The point of the scene is to desecrate the virtues of the outgroup and humiliate them. Which is why the latter part of the scene includes a German soldier submitting immediately after the brave soldier is beaten to death.

Yeah, when the war broke out and people started unironically reposting a deepfake of this scene with Zelensky and Putin I was deeply weirded out: how could all of them ignore the mood of the scene? It's not like it's some subtle undercurrent that you need to be a film connoisseur to notice. I guess people are too Pavlovian and can't help reacting to "punching nazis" with anything but applause.

A lot (probably the majority) of mainstream ‘Holocaust fiction’ (Schindler’s List, The Boy In Striped Pyjamas etc) ‘humanizes’ German characters as a relatively central part of the plot.

Tarantino’s performative leftism (also seen in e.g., Django) as a distraction from his love of the n-word and his weird foot fetish isn’t a central illustration of writing about the Holocaust/WW2 dehumanizing Germans. Tarantino isn’t even Jewish.

Inbetween German children playing, they have a crazed German soldier screaming Valhalla as he shoots into a bonfire filled with dead jews. This shit is surreal, not humanizing. It perverts the image of a normal German as being just a goosestep away from maniacal slaughter. The individual humanized German characters are the exception in every piece of media I remember consuming about the topic, not the norm.

I kind of care that Germans are painted as remorseless monsters that murder for sport in mainstream Holocaust propaganda. I find it kind of gross to see a people dehumanized in such a way. When the 'Bear Jew' is depicted as smashing a German soldiers skull in, and his actions are seen as righteous and jovial, I kind of get sick in my stomach.

Yeah. Assumed the Bear Jew scene was intended as intentionally lampooning the audience for denying the humanity of the aged German officer, but from what I know of Tarantino it seems far more 'lul Nazi died' geared.

To mark yourself as someone that is interested in 'the thing', rather than a particular agenda. The specifics of death count estimates are fine, pick your number and justify it with evidence but point out underestimates as well, point out that it's hard to retrospectively figure it out. Point out the work of established scholars and point out differences in methodology that are relevant so the person can make up their own mind. Find the common ground and then be fair minded about data gaps, not being able to track every individual doesn't definitely mean they weren't part of a camp execution does it? Do you expect every death to be recorded in camp records that have survived to this day.

Or, if your concern is about depictions of German's in media, focus on that. I probably agree with you about parts of this. I think people can become complacent when they view Nazis as an other. The next Nazis will not be called Nazis.

Or point out the Jewish network as controlling the world if you can do it in a new way without tropes.

But don't do it all together. Actually I haven't read enough of your posts to know much so feel free to ignore anything I say that's not relevant.

Well, what's the coherent historical narrative for the deniers that makes sense?

If I go to a place like the CODOH site or its bookstore, all I see is endless debunkings of this-and-that, but I have yet to encounter something like a simple timeline or a summary of what the deniers actually think happened vis-a-vis Nazis and the Jews - ie. what the Nazis actually tried to accomplish, how were the Jews in the occupied or Nazi-aligned areas of Europe moved around during the course of the war, how did we end up with there being millions of Jews in the area of Poland before WW2 and 200 000 after the war, and so on.

The closest is the Sanning book endlessly thrown at any questions of "Where did the Jews go?" and, among the many critiques of the book made by me and others here, one is that its narrative essentially relies on going "Well, a huge amount of them went to Soviet Union and then the Soviets murdered them or something idk ¯_(ツ)_/¯" without the deniers apparently feeling any duty to present basically any concrete evidence to prove this claimed genocide.

If there is such a coherent narrative somewhere that doesn't simply revolve around the mainstream historiography and whatever its claimed errors are, where is it?

There was a war in Europe. A lot of people died. The end.

If you want to presuppose that population estimates for the jewish diaspora in Europe were 100% accurate, and that post war you could accurately estimate exactly where those jews ended up after the war, you are very correct in deducing that those jews had to go somewhere if not counted somewhere. If you then want to conclude that every single jew not accounted for had to have been killed by Germans, go right ahead.

However, if you hold that in contrast with any other similar event in the history of the war, you would conclude that the above standard is insane. The best illustration of this being the post-war German population that was ethnically cleansed from the eastern regions. What are those estimates like? Give or take 2 million. No certainty, no assurances, no grand narrative that holds the truth hostage. Everyone just accepts that available data is extremely bad. No one pretends to know anything.

Now, because the Germans are not a sacred cow beyond reproach, they did a more thorough investigation and found the confirmed number of dead to be closer to 500k. Imagine that. An expulsion of 16 million people, 14 million can be roughly accounted for. Not by name or anything, just by looking at broad population numbers that Germany had. Instead of just blindly counting the missing 2 million as confirmed dead at the hands of evil slavs who hate Germans, they can just not know the answer of where the last 1.5 million went or if they ever were, since they are not bound by a theory of history that is illegal to question.

As a side note: People looking at the ethnic cleansing of Germans post war don't cite anti-German war propaganda from the Soviet Union as proof of hateful intent to lend credence to the notion that these 1.5 million were definitely killed by slavs. I mean, there is no lack of accounts of rape and murder done by Russian soldiers in the occupied areas. There's no lack of intent, as can be seen in speeches and other war propaganda. That's proof of something, right? At least enough to add another 500k, right?... See how insane this looks? Yet somehow the 'convergence of evidence' is, seemingly, the most popular go to excuse for why people here believe in the holocaust.

Do we really know how many Germans died? We don't. And no one loses any sleep over not having a grand theory of exactly what happened. There was a war in Europe. A lot of people died. The end.

So the answer is "the deniers don't have a coherent historical narrative that makes sense"? Considering the manhours of energy spent poring over minutiae in camp construction and witness testimony, one would think that there would be at least one attempt at constructing an overarching history of the Jews in WW2 Europe from a denier perspective, without being tied to just being commentary on the mainstream historiography (which has produced a wealth of such narratives).

At least according to Wikipedia, the official German estimate of the deaths from Eastern European expulsions of Germans is in the ballpark of a bit over 2 million (which has always been the number I've understood to be correct, before this) and the theories that the actual number is around half a million continue to be "challenger" theories. Even so, whichever the number is, we're talking about whether the amount of Germans dying in Central/Eastern Europe in the aftermath of WW2 is around 0,5 % or 2 %, not whether the amount of Jews dying in the same region in 1941-1945 is over a half or in low single digits; the sheer scales of population reduction in certain demographic group are completely different.

There are plenty of 'deniers' who have larger historical narratives about what happened, like David Irving and others. I'm not one of them. I find historical narratives in general to be nonsense. The world, as I've lived in it, doesn't objectively move in easily digested narratives. Sometimes there are things I don't understand. Causal chains of events that are beyond me. But history somehow doesn't have this problem ever. I'm inherently skeptical of history because of this. Same with news media and the like.

I have seen real time how one narrative can make way for another. I mean, do we need to imagine how history according to mainstream news sources looks with regards to someone like Trump? Seems awfully important to recognize who is writing the story.

As for German deaths, this is the article I read They float all the same theories a 'denier' would float relating to jews and how difficult it can be to estimate things.

I agree that the scale is different. But you can't go from that to the mainstream historical holocaust narrative without contradicting the methodology used to ascertain German civilian losses and the inherent skepticism baked into that narrative. Holocaust history has its own standard. On top of that, the Germans have the luxury of not having to deal with the Soviet Union. A regime that has many a time been caught intentionally distorting its demographic data. That in and of itself is a big factor and to that end I find 4 million as opposed to 6 to be very reasonable based on nothing but population estimates.

The proportion of Jews presumed dead/vanished in Eastern Europe (in many cases over 80% or 90%) vastly, vastly exceeds the casualty rate for gentile civilians in the same locations. The occurrence of a targeted genocide is therefore a rational deduction.

And isn’t it interesting that, as you note, 85%+ at least of the Germans you consider survived the war, and the great majority of civilians in occupied Eastern Europe also survived, but 80%+ of Jews disappeared? That alone is enough to consider that something in particular happened to them.

It's enough to recognize that there is a great discrepancy between pre-war population estimates and post-war ones. Asserting that because the discrepancy exists, you therefor know what happened is not rational.

Doubly so for the motive and method of the killer after eyewitness testimony that is relied on to evidence the occurrence has in some cases been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be baseless lies, and in others eyewitness testimony stands as completely unbelievable, as with masturbation machines, German soldiers throwing toddlers into the air for target practice or electric flooring.

I think something bad certainly happened to a lot of jews during this time, but the scale of which is not accurately reflected in mainstream holocaust history and it does not lend itself to much credibility so long as it relies on eyewitness testimony.

The theory that "in war, shit happens" does not explain why so many more civilians died in Eastern Europe than in, say, France during World War 2, even if you account for the relative durations that those territories were actively being fought over. It also does not explain why specifically Jews, and also Poles and Roma, died in such larger numbers relative to their population sizes compared to members of other ethnicities.

I find arguing about the holocaust to be strange as it's ultimately quibbling over details that don't really matter in any practical sense.

6 million, 5 million, 4 million, are all the same number and that number is "a lot".

The baseline assumption for belief, for people who don't know a lot about Holocaust history, is that there is a coherent narrative that makes sense, the historians have consistently agreed on, and the historical evidence has consistently supported.

And they are correct, that narrative is that during the second world war the German government deliberately killed a lot of jews on the basis of their ethnicity. This is supported by such a weight of evidence supporting this that it's accepted by pretty much all reasonable people who don't have ulterior motives for trying to weaken said narrative.

Frankly I don't think anyone is surprised that the party who incessantly harped on about the evil of jews, blamed them for pretty much all that they believed was wrong in the world and systematically eroded their rights then went on to go kill large numbers of jews when they got the chance. It's on par with a rapper releasing a song rapping about how they really hate someone and want to murder them, before going out and murdering them.

If the number is not 6 million but 4 million then the Holocaust narrative isn't correct and people would not be correct in believing in it. If you don't believe those kinds of details to be important then your perspective isn't very relevant to a discussion on the Holocaust. Especially not as I defined it in my post.

that narrative is that during the second world war the German government deliberately killed a lot of jews on the basis of their ethnicity.

This is broadening the scope of the topic to a point where any act of war is now proof of a holocaust. Germans deliberately killed Russians as part of the war. Russians deliberately killed Germans as part of the war. If this is your view of the narrative it is just irrelevant to the critiques being made against the historical holocaust narrative.

If your point is that Germans killed jews because they didn't like them, and that's the only important part of the story, then I have to say that you don't have much to stand on when it comes to the complaints Russians have. The Germans sure did kill a lot more of them.

This is supported by such a weight of evidence supporting this that it's accepted by pretty much all reasonable people who don't have ulterior motives for trying to weaken said narrative.

Yes, people dying in WW2 is supported by a lot of evidence. Other than that your sentence is such a shitball I can't believe you wrote it. "pretty much all reasonable people who don't have ulterior motives"? Really?

No one is claiming no jews died. No one is claiming Germans liked jews. But to what end Germans pursued the killing of jews, the actual scope of said killings and the deliberation behind it are all important parts of the historical narrative. Questioning those parts is valid and the truth stands on its own no matter what motives you feel are behind it.

On that point it would be something if all that rhetoric you spout could be turned back at you. Say, for instance, if a jew like Simon Wiesenthal admitted to deliberately lying about how many people died in the Holocaust to make the thing seem more believable to non-jews. I mean, would jews really do that? Just lie to support a narrative like the Holocaust? Would jews really lie about being put into gas chambers? I mean, being the center of victimary discourse in the west sure has its perks. So there's a motive. Can I just paint you as another Simon Wiesenthal or a Dachau jew who lied about gas chambers? After all, we all know that most reasonable people who investigate the evidence for the holocaust come away feeling very skeptical about it! ;)

Seems like your rhetoric fits rather snugly on the other foot. I would say that just as much as some have motive to question the narrative, others have a motive to uphold it. Recognizing that is one thing, but pretending only one side is doing it? Now there's some motivated reasoning.

This is broadening the scope of the topic to a point where any act of war is now proof of a holocaust. Germans deliberately killed Russians as part of the war. Russians deliberately killed Germans as part of the war.

Both sides certainly killed large numbers of each others soldiers and there were extensive civilian casualties involved with bombing campaigns, starvation and so on throughout the war. But your example doesn’t really make sense. It’s more like the US going to war with, say, Iraq, and the regular civilian casualty rate being 2% of the population but somehow 40% of Iraqi Kurds mysteriously die over the course of 5 years. This would indeed imply a particular targeting of that group on an ethnic basis. Of course, there are other potential explanations, but now imagine that the US had spent a decade demonizing Kurds as part of state ideology and a central pillar of its political program. Again, suspicions mount.

If the number is not 6 million but 4 million then the Holocaust narrative isn't correct and people would not be correct in believing in it. If you don't believe those kinds of details to be important then your perspective isn't very relevant to a discussion on the Holocaust. Especially not as I defined it in my post.

Of course what you and @SecureSignals do is focus very narrowly on minute details like this, and then stone-facedly insist that anyone who won't consider the possibility that it was 2 or 4 million instead of 6 million isn't to be taken seriously, while also insisting that if you do take it seriously you're a "denier."

@DoW's point was that 2, 4, or 6 million would still be genocide. A Holocaust. A deliberate campaign by the Nazis to murder as many Jews as they could. We're quibbling about just how successful they were and/or how many Jews there actually were to begin with.

You throw chaff like "There was a war in Europe. A lot of people died. The end." But while of course we are very unlikely to be able to get precise figures, even in an event as cataclysmic as World War II, no, literally millions of people do not just untraceably disappear like that.

So you focus hard on that 6 million number because it's so iconic and because if you can crack that, if you can get someone to admit that maybe it was actually 4 million... what, the whole narrative falls apart? It doesn't, but, you also know the reason why people don't really want to argue with you about how many millions it was. Because you don't actually care how many millions it was. Deniers aren't concerned with historical accuracy; they're concerned with The Narrative. The Narrative is that Jews were victims of a genocide, which is generally considered to be a bad thing and something they didn't deserve. Deniers, generally speaking, are in the "It didn't happen and if it did, the Jews had it coming" camp. If we uncovered rock-solid evidence tomorrow of the Holocaust happening and being a planned campaign by the Nazis to exterminate Jews, evidence of such nature that even deniers couldn't pretend it wasn't real (though honestly my imagination fails me when trying to conceive of evidence they wouldn't invent new narratives about, after reading "all the Nazis who admitted what they did were just tortured," "all the Jews who saw the murders are lying," "all the Allied soldiers who found the camps were just finding starving people in work camps and then the Jews lied about what happened to them," and "millions of people vanished into the Soviet hinterlands, the end"), it would not make a difference. Deniers are not, after all, historians in pursuit of correcting the historical record. They are ideologues who hate Jews.

Personally, I have marginally more respect for people who at least are very clear and open about their beliefs and their agendas and don't try to hide them. What Holocaust deniers do is the equivalent of white nationalists who won't openly admit to being white nationalists who think we should segregate into ethnostates, but instead just post endlessly about HBD pretending to be concerned with the shoddy state of biological research. Note that this is not a claim that HBD isn't real, just as I wouldn't be surprised if it was really 4 million Jews instead of 6 million. In a better world where we really are having good faith discussions about "the Truth," I would be a lot more interested in listening to someone talk about IQ differences, or how exactly we get Holocaust casualty figures.

In my comment to Stefferi, which you have obviously read, I give a very specific example where, in fact, millions of people seemingly just untraceably disappeared. The death counts can swing in the millions in specific instances, and sometimes dozens of millions over the course of the entire war, because the data is very inaccurate. Recognizing this fact instead of asserting certainty is a far cry from not caring about historical accuracy.

This is a very obvious truth that is easy to recognize.

As I went over in my comment to Stefferi, The Germans, post war, recognized this and used the most reliable data available. They had two things: A limited number of certified dead, and a rough population based estimate. The rough estimate said 2.2 million. The certified dead said 500k. So 500k it is. This isn't seen as denial, this isn't seen as some psychological ailment fueled by ideology and hate. It's just the most accurate data available.

The historical Holocaust narrative has a problem. The most reliable data available isn't super reliable. It's often based on eyewitness testimony and a lot of the alleged incriminating physical evidence is alleged to have been destroyed, lost in time, or not properly captured. So annoying guys called 'holocaust deniers' start poking holes in specific elements of the story. Those discussions are technical and beyond the scope of most people. So the fallback is generally: Well, then "where did the jews go"?

Well, they went the way of the 1.5 million missing Germans who disappeared post-war. They went the way of many a man who never existed despite being counted as alive and well when a demographer decided to assume a certain population growth when calculating a population size based on an estimate carried out sometime before he was even born.

To make it simple, you are presupposing things to be that are not in any way proven. The only reason you do this is because you already believe in the Holocaust. You already drink the Cool-Aid. In any other neutral situation, like with the ethnic cleansing of Germans from the eastern regions post-war, this isn't a topic of contention for anyone.

My position isn't complex. You don't need to be ideologically motivated to recognize the reasoning behind it because it's not presented as an ideological position. You can assert that motives invalidate reason, and I would respectfully disagree.

As for the rest of your post, both you and DoW seem incapable of understanding the scope of my comment. If you want to argue about something other than the specifics of the claims regarding the Holocaust, why reply to my comment here? It pertained very specifically to people who believe in the historical holocaust narrative. That narrative does not just say that jews were genocided. It makes very specific claims about how many, when, why and how. And the people who believe the historical holocaust narrative do so with great confidence.

I'm not here to tell people what to think beyond the fact that 6 million is, as it stands, highly implausible. And that people have an unexamined and undue confidence in the mainstream historical holocaust narrative.

I think it serves those who are ideologically motivated to inflate the holocaust, for whatever reason, to poison the well of justified skepticism exactly like you are doing now. With uncharitable and unfounded assertions of hate and whatever else.

In my comment to Stefferi, which you have obviously read, I give a very specific example where, in fact, millions of people seemingly just untraceably disappeared.

Yes, I did read your claims.

To make it simple, you are presupposing things to be that are not in any way proven. The only reason you do this is because you already believe in the Holocaust. You already drink the Cool-Aid.

I believe in the Holocaust in the same way I believe we landed on the moon and that JFK was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald and the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hit by planes. I am aware that there are alternate theories claiming otherwise, and I admit I have not personally done the legwork, interviews, and archival records searches to verify each of them, nor done a deeper dive on those subjects that the average educated layman. But what I have seen is pretty convincing, and your arguments are no more credible than those of the people claiming NASA faked the moon landings or that the Pentagon was actually struck by a missile. (I find the latter claim particularly incredible because while I was not there, I personally know people who saw the plane. Just as I have met people who saw the camps.) Of course people pushing a conspiracy that requires ignoring all evidence except the very carefully curated bits they want to be considered always pull out that "you drank the Kool-aid" line.

I think it serves those who are ideologically motivated to inflate the holocaust, for whatever reason, to poison the well of justified skepticism exactly like you are doing now. With uncharitable and unfounded assertions of hate and whatever else.

Is my claim uncharitable and unfounded? You have frequently argued that Jews are a hostile, tribal people, inimical to all non-Jews, and that the Holocaust is essentially a memetic weapon in their ongoing war against gentiles. You have made your animosity to Jews pretty clear, so while you may consider your hate justified, I don't think you can plausibly deny that it exists or that I am being uncharitable in pointing it out, and that whenever a Holocaust denier posts here, the more overt anti-Jew stuff is sure to follow.

Yes, I did read your claims.

Then why say that millions of people do not just disappear when they do? Whatever.

I believe in the Holocaust in the same way I believe we landed on the moon and that JFK was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald and the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hit by planes.

I guess that's a difference between us then. I try to not hold strong opinions on things I don't know a lot about in general. If someone brings up an alternative hypothesis to something mainstream I'm not super animated that to the point of asserting that they are in fact a hateful person and then try to implicitly lump them in with low status people. That kind of a disposition would, in fact, indicate that I cared a lot despite admitting I don't know a lot. Which is stupid and arrogant.

Of course people pushing a conspiracy that requires ignoring all evidence except the very carefully curated bits they want to be considered always pull out that "you drank the Kool-aid" line.

Considering I just wrote an entire post describing why I consider 4 more plausible than 6, this is just asinine. So is the attempt at psychologizing me as a conspiracy theorist. Jewish eyewitnesses lying about gas chambers in Dachau is not a conspiracy.

Is my claim uncharitable and unfounded?

Yes, extremely so. You misrepresent my positions as well as asserting that I "hate" when I don't.

I guess that's a difference between us then. I try to not hold strong opinions on things I don't know a lot about in general.

You clearly have strong opinions about Jews. What are your credentials in that area?

What makes you think I don't know a lot about the Holocaust in general? What would qualify me as "knowing a lot"? I have read books (yes, actual full-length books) about it. I have watched documentaries and interviews. I have personally spoken to Holocaust survivors and WWII vets who were there. I have not personally traveled to Germany, I have not gone to any national archives to do independent research of my own, but on what basis do you claim to be more knowledgeable than me?

I'm not super animated that to the point of asserting that they are in fact a hateful person and then try to implicitly lump them in with low status people.

Always this rhetorical gimmick: "You have a consistent position you express frequently: wow, why do you care so much? You're super animated!"

I could as easily ask the same: why are you "so animated" about Jews that you have to comment every time Jews or the Holocaust are mentioned? (And you do.) Yet when I observe this and conclude that you clearly feel some animus towards Jews, that's being "uncharitable."

As for low status, if your goal is for anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers not to be viewed as low status... well, sorry, you can fight history, but I'm on history's side here.

Considering I just wrote an entire post describing why I consider 4 more plausible than 6, this is just asinine

You use lots of insulting, derogatory language, with insults unconnected to what you are replying to. I am much more civil to you, yet if I use even mild sarcasm, you complain about my words and then report me for "antagonism." So to address the specific claim here: no, it is not "asinine" for me to dismiss your "Kool-aid" sneer just because you made an argument for 4 million dead Jews instead of 6 million. If I am unconvinced by your argument that the 6 million figure is wrong, that is not "drinking Kool-aid," metaphorically speaking. And I have in fact already admitted that I don't find it implausible that the 6 million figure is not entirely accurate - I think it was in the millions, and if I were really "super animated" about it, maybe I'd care enough to do the research and see if I agree with you that it was really 4 million. But for reasons we have already discussed, I don't think that's really an important distinction, because while you may think knocking down the 6 million figure would unravel the entire "Holocaust narrative," I don't.

Yes, extremely so. You misrepresent my positions as well as asserting that I "hate" when I don't.

So how would you describe your feeling towards Jews? Contempt? Dislike? Fear? Someone always talking about how Jews are inimical and an existential threat to one's race and culture denying that he feels any "hate" towards them sounds like the white nationalists who insist they don't dislike black people even though they think we should put them in Bantustans. I mean sure, they probably don't personally hate every black person they meet and have an utopian ideal of blacks and whites living peacefully in segregated ethnostates, but (a) I strongly suspect that's just a mask for most of them, and (b) even for the sincere ones, assuming some level of animosity is a motivator is not unreasonable. You want to go on and on about Jews but complain that I am being uncharitable in accusing you of hating Jews. So fine, I'll ask you directly to explain your position and your sentiments clearly, then, if you would like to disabuse me of my misapprehensions, but I suspect that like @SecureSignals, you will dodge the question.

More comments

I do get the impression sometimes that the Holocaust denial argument seems to be premised on the idea that if they can successfully quibble some detail of 'the narrative', this will explode the entire concept of the Holocaust.

Let's retreat to the motte a bit. When I say 'the Holocaust', what I mean is that, between the years of 1939 and 1945, the German state deliberately attempted to kill all the Jews in Europe.

Specific details about how can be quibbled! The exact number of casualties is quibbleable. As noted below, intentionalism versus functionalism is a real debate in mainstream Holocaust studies, and that's an argument about where the initiative came from. Any one location can be quibbled. But none of that contradicts the Holocaust as a whole. The base claim is simple. The German state tried to kill all the Jews.

And that claim specifically seems pretty darn robust.

If the number is not 6 million but 4 million then the Holocaust narrative isn't correct and people would not be correct in believing in it

You appear to have just completely missed a good chunk of my original post, let me reiterate, those numbers are the same, because they are both "a lot". At this scale, that kind of range just blurs into meaninglessness inside the human brain, which is not able to instinctively understand the difference in the same way it would between 5 and 10. There's nothing practical to be gained by quibbling over the precise figure so long as "wow that's a lot of dead people" is the default reaction.

This is broadening the scope of the topic to a point where any act of war is now proof of a holocaust.

No it isn't, the deliberate attempt to exterminate Jewish non-combatants on a mass scale is proof of a holocaust. You don't need to be at war to do that.

Germans deliberately killed Russians as part of the war.

Because they considered them to be untermensch, who would eventually need to be disposed of and as such were only left alive when it was not more convenient to kill them. The Germans held themselves to different standards when dealing with races that they considered to be inferior than when dealing with those they considered their racial equals. The Oradour-sur-Glane massacre was a shocking barbarity in the west, but standard practise in the east.

Russians deliberately killed Germans as part of the war

The Soviet Union did not place a very high value on the life of its own men, let alone those of a great ideological enemy that had invaded their country, massacred civilians and considered them to be sub-human. The red army didn't care to exert the kind of force it would have needed to rein in their soldiers when they had practically no sympathy for the people the soldiers were murdering and raping.

"pretty much all reasonable people who don't have ulterior motives"? Really?

Yes really. Reasonable people don't tend to care about a topic this niche with this much passion. The only people I've ever encountered to be this invested in the topic are anti-semites that lack the strength of their convictions to just say "yes it happened and I'd do it again if I could", arabs and zionists.

Recognizing that is one thing, but pretending only one side is doing it? Now there's some motivated reasoning.

I don't pretend, there are plenty of people who believe they can benefit from trying to play the numbers up and they sound just as motivated to anyone that wasn't born yesterday. That said they also tend not to try and rely on the usual attritional approach of "spew bullshit, try to sound authorative and drown anyone who disagrees with leading questions until they get bored and leave", instead preferring "get very emotional and hope everyone stops thinking".

@DoW's point was that 2, 4, or 6 million would still be genocide. A Holocaust. A deliberate campaign by the Nazis to murder as many Jews as they could. We're quibbling about just how successful they were and/or how many Jews there actually were to begin with.

You are still begging the question. It's the official narrative that claims there was "a deliberate campaign by the Nazis to murder as many Jews as they could." Revisionists claim that there was no such campaign, but that's not to say no Jews were killed. The Allies killed many German civilians before and after the war but it wouldn't be accurate to say they waged a campaign to kill as many as they could. Instead, they had actual policies and strategies, including ethnic cleansing and strategic firebombings of civilian population centers, that resulted in many civilian casualties. But if I were to claim they had a campaign to kill as many Germans as possible I would need to provide strong evidence that such a campaign actually existed. Revisionists claim there was no such campaign, which is why it's a salient issue.

Do you think it matters if the claim you have made, that there was a "deliberate campaign by the Nazis to murder as many Jews as they could" is true or false? Do you think it matters if it turns out no Jews were murdered inside homicidal gas chambers diguised as shower rooms?

You appear to have just completely missed a good chunk of my original post

I didn't at all. You make factual assertions that have been the contention of many a holocaust debate in your reply. You act like you are above the details yet rely on them.

Me telling you that your outlook did not belong in the conversation didn't pertain to just the numbers. It pertains to all the pocket anecdotes and tit bits of history that people assume to be true before they make grand sweeping statements about things and why X and Y happened as if all the happenings of history can be reduced to the consequence of things that fit into a soundbite from the History Channel.

The problem with revising the Holocaust is that a lot of the evidence is contingent on other things. If those things didn't happen or happened in a different way or scale then the whole story changes.

No it isn't, the deliberate attempt to exterminate Jewish non-combatants on a mass scale is proof of a holocaust. You don't need to be at war to do that.

You are not just arguing for your pocket theory of the Holocaust and why it matters, you are arguing against mainstream theories like Functionalism in the process.

I don't pretend, there are plenty of people who believe they can benefit from trying to play the numbers up and they sound just as motivated to anyone that wasn't born yesterday. That said they also tend not to try and rely on the usual attritional approach of "spew bullshit, try to sound authorative and drown anyone who disagrees with leading questions until they get bored and leave", instead preferring "get very emotional and hope everyone stops thinking".

This describes your own post. I don't know what else you want me to say.

Yes really. Reasonable people don't tend to care about a topic this niche with this much passion.

Not to disagree with the rest of your post, but this place is full of people investing a lot of attention to extremely niche topics in the grand scheme of things. There are very few 'reasonable people' in this thread by such a standard.

I've been curious about the popular appeal of transhumanism. From my perspective it seems to operate as a low-effort utopian vision that allows people to bypass some real problem that exists by kicking it down the road.

It also reflects I think a search for transcendence which is latent in the Western world and in this aspect acts as a misplaced transference of genuine searching.

Now, I also have a lot of hope in technology - I would describe myself as techno-fix, and I've no interest in predicting against its potential, particularly over time scales that feel very long against the rapid pace of change we see now, say 100 or 200 years, but even so I find the transhumanist visions outlined unrealistic and fundamentally missing the point. Now my thoughts are likely based on very outdated knowledge and so I'm open to having them updated by the latest state of the art. Also I probably lack imagination, so feel free to tear me a new one as they say...

Moving to Mars, space

Now I think space frontiers should be explored, but we do run up against some pretty hard problems here. The most utopian visions, creating a fully viable atmosphere and water rich environment would seem to be somewhat fanciful. The second choice, some kind of resource-supported colony would seem to require inordinate resourcing and even then you've just got people living indoors, in a desert, not really much to inspire the human race with. Also what happens at this colony, who runs it, owns out- I don't think anyone thinks it would run any better than the systems we have already but I guess as a last resort to nuclear fallout and environmental catastrophe it bears thinking about. But again, not really very inspiring vision here.

More to the point, we already have a beautiful planet with an atmosphere, water and abundant resources - shouldn't the utopian impulse make us redouble our efforts for poor old Earth, instead of giving the glad eye to some ugly red rock? Of course both are possible but you do have to wonder about distracting focus.

Freezing our body, brain to come back later

The technical challenges of this are immense, as to how you maintain function while in the frozen state. It's not only the fracturing problem in freeze, thaw it's the lack of the electrical, chemical signalling on which neurones are formed and maintained. I'd go as far to say it's a modal confusion of what we are, which is a process more than a thing. But perhaps I'm not being sufficiently visionary in the technology.

Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so. Curiosity is one thing, but living in a different era, what sort of culture shock would that be like, how our if place would you be, and living forever would be equivalent to hell as far as I'm concerned, similar with Rice's vampires.

Changing sex

I'll admit changes are afoot in terms of biology. Gene editing is already being tested for rare diseases, organ creation could become trivial, re-enervation to treat spinal injuries etc. But I'll admit I'm still puzzled when people talk about changing sex, and even changing sex back and forth. What do people mean here? Obviously secondary sex characteristics can be changed and new tech could mean surgical techniques become straightforward and remove risk and provide function, so conceivably issues around numbing of sensation in a new nipple could be resolved, or an embryo could be implanted successfully in an implanted/engineered womb, uterus. But are we really calling this changing sex? How far will it be possible to engineer all the internal bits, eggs, fallopian tubes, etc while simultaneously atrophying the wrong bits. I'm struggling to see how you'd ever get ethical permission to establish such an insane idea, or why you would want to try. This says nothing about brain structures developed during puberty and the various complex hormonal interactions that influence structure, function and ultimately behaviour. This would seem to really get closer to some omniscient level of requisite knowledge of exactly what makes us up. Will we ever be able to change all of our cells?

I just don't see the appeal to this idea, and the fetish around changing sex or being something other than what you are already. It seems like a dystopia to be so focused on the surface aspects of Self when we could imagine a world where your sex is less relevant.

So to my mind, and possibly uninformed view this transhumanism is a utopian distraction from the issues of the day and a failure to think about true transcendence through a more spiritual realm. It is exactly the sort of mistaken thinking our late-stage secular materialist society would make when faced with the existential problems of today. And frankly it seems lazy, rather than explore philosophical questions around what it is to be a man/woman or what identity is, it acts as a catch-all macguffin type thing.

I think I agree with you.

Transhumanism is a techy way to not have to deal with the Only Serious Philosophical Question.

Handwaving a universe beyond our bodies is a way of passing the buck on living correctly with what we have.

I get the appeal, it's the same desperate escapism that fuels every other utopian religion.

It's just always wrong. There is no escape from the human condition. Life is pain, and anyone tells you different is selling something.

Most people will believe anything that lets them avoid this simple and basic conclusion.

"Because you do not love yourself, otherwise you would love your nature and her commands."

The technical challenges of this are immense, as to how you maintain function while in the frozen state. It's not only the fracturing problem in freeze, thaw it's the lack of the electrical, chemical signalling on which neurones are formed and maintained. I'd go as far to say it's a modal confusion of what we are, which is a process more than a thing. But perhaps I'm not being sufficiently visionary in the technology.

the fact it has never been shown to work on any animal, for one

Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so. Curiosity is one thing, but living in a different era, what sort of culture shock would that be like, how our if place would you be, and living forever would be equivalent to hell as far as I'm concerned, similar with Rice's vampires.

I'm puzzled by the opposite view. think of all the things to learn and explore, and that all abruptly must stop when you die. It would not be being forced to living forever; anyone would have the option to discontinue their life at any time.

Changing sex

this is pretty much a reality already .

the fact it has never been shown to work on any animal, for one

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-revive-tiny-animals-spent-24000-years-ice-180977928/

https://www.seeker.com/frozen-animal-brought-back-to-life-after-30-years-1770755485.html

Perhaps you think rotifers and tardigrades are not central examples of animals, but animals have been brought back to life after being frozen.

i mean something like a rodent or bigger. something with a circulatory system and a full brain

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1365902/?page=3

Rats, repeatedly.

Yes I've heard a lot of people are in favour of extending it out.

Changing sex is still impossible last time I looked, perhaps you mean sex characteristics?

Given current trajectories, Transhumanism and Posthumanism are the default futures.

Homemade biological modification will become more prevalent and likely, and the tools will become more difficult to regulate as patents and copyrights on the technologies expire. People want to be able to modify their bodies- whether it's injectables like semaglutide for weight loss or the jews of gender taking pills that give them breasts, or women taking injectables for more plump lips and hips, or people injecting magnets in their fingers for little parlor tricks.

If you have the means, you will be able to modify your body as you want. Modify your kids to be in the shape and form you want via embryo selection. These are futures that are happening now and will not go away. The social pressure for access to these tools will not abate.

As such, my position is that attacking transhumanism is a fool's errand.

I'm assuming we'll maintain a concept of medical ethics, and evidence-based medicine. And whatever we do, well still be faced with the same issues we have now around meaning and well-being.

Ah yes, the famously-solved and not at all under debate questions about right of patients and consent toward self-modification.

Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so.

I'm puzzled that anyone is puzzled by this. Living is awesome, and 80 years isn't nearly enough, especially when the last 60 are spent in slow decay.

Transhumanism, beyond being generalized humanism, increasingly looks like the Emperor has no clothes philosophy.

Yes, good things are good, and we should have more of them, even acknowledging the nebulous potential where they turn bad. Hell, that's awesome!

People have been gaslit (in the actual sense of the word) into going sour grapes at the prospect of living longer by humanity's impotence in the face of death for millenia, let alone the religious getting upset when we can potentially produce heaven on Earth without the dubious prospect of having to die to see for ourselves what comes next.

I also find this a very strange comment indeed. I guess 80 seems a long way away when you're 30? I suspect the number of 80 year olds who would turn down a second youth and another 80+ years (and more besides) is near zero, especially if you could bring along your spouse etc. Culture shock is hardly such a terrible condition.

More to the point, we already have a beautiful planet with an atmosphere, water and abundant resources - shouldn't the utopian impulse make us redouble our efforts for poor old Earth, instead of giving the glad eye to some ugly red rock? Of course both are possible but you do have to wonder about distracting focus.

Part of what you seem to be missing, which is core to the transhumanist philosophy, is that most humans are dull, weak, and most of all stupid. The transhumanist vision sees Earth as a trap, because it's only a matter of time, from their perspective, before we all destroy ourselves. They may have a point, but that is the primary motivation to go to space. Even if it's often hidden behind other motivations in the public sphere.

Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so.

I've lost faith that longevity will meaningfully increase in our lifetimes, but fear of death is pretty rational imo. I'm always puzzled as to why people are afraid of eternity. I mean sure life is full of suffering, but if you can grow up a bit and handle the shit in your life, you'll see that you can outgrow what your younger self thought was possible. I want to keep growing as long as I can.

I just don't see the appeal to this idea, and the fetish around changing sex or being something other than what you are already. It seems like a dystopia to be so focused on the surface aspects of Self when we could imagine a world where your sex is less relevant.

A theory others have discussed here that I'm finding more and more credible is the idea that the trans-urge is less of a fetish, and more of a denial of self. It's a sort of attempt to destroy the current self and be reborn as something new, coming from a fundamental place of self-loathing.

I'm sure there's more to it than that, but I find that explanation much more compelling than the fetish side of things.

Yes, I agree with the denial of self as a part of the new cohort- that makes sense. With the fetish I was actually talking about society generally, seems to be many people see it as the next cab off the rank as a lifestyle+ option...

You can’t separate “colonizing space” from a kind of frontier, Wild West fantasy. That’s why it captured the imagination of Americans in particular to such an extent. Life on the homestead, on Mars - it even has desert, just the like the real Wild West! You only need to draw a very large dome over the ranch and add some solar panels, and there you have it, ten acres for every family. (Setting up a self-sufficient homestead is not even particularly expensive in the modern US if you’re not picky about location and willing to work very very hard, so one wonders why so few of these fantasists seem to do it!)

Of course in reality it’s all bullshit, space colonization is one of the greatest wastes of resources imaginable. Unless or until the technology is developed to quickly travel to other solar systems with planets that might actually support life, there is no reason to settle space - it won’t stop x-risk (as @self_made_human suggests, most sources of x-risk would also affect a Martian colony) and even a nuked, irradiated earth would be easier for humans to live on than Mars. The other planets in our solar system are immeasurably worse than earth in every way for life. Terraforming would take thousands or tens of thousands of years with technology we can scarcely imagine. And with the human population likely to peak in the next century anyway, there are no pressing Malthusian concerns for humanity, earth will still be pretty empty even with 10 billion humans. Any resource gathering or scientific work that one might need to do in space can be done by robots/probes/AI in tandem, there is no need for humans to be out there at all.

I'm not opposed to NASA, planting the US flag on Mars might well be justified from a national pride perspective, or because of technology invented along the way. But let's not fool ourselves that colonizing space, in and of itself, is the solution to any of humanity's major challenges.

space colonization is one of the greatest wastes of resources imaginable.

In the 10 seconds it took you to type this, over 10^21 kWh of Sol's sunlight was lost to humanity forever. That's $10 million trillion, at cheaper than wholesale energy prices; that's a hundred millennia of current world GDP.

Develop a bolder imagination.

If you read my comment I say that resource extraction in space (presumably including sunlight) might well be justified, but that this can be handled by robots, and does not require people living in space.

Were you picturing the resources all being used on Earth? Spread among a Dyson cloud of colonies, that much energy is a nice standard of living for quadrillions of people. Concentrated on Earth the waste heat would vaporize us.

It's a lot easier to get the resources to people when the people are in space too, I assume.

Setting up a self-sufficient homestead is not even particularly expensive in the modern US if you’re not picky about location and willing to work very very hard, so one wonders why so few of these fantasists seem to do it!

So where would you do that? In the continental US, you can't escape the Sword of Damocles of a something-studies graduate coming along and saying that your homestead is built on stolen Indian land, or the law school graduate coming along and finding some tax code or ADA regulation that you can get extorted over, and nowhere on Earth can you escape the environmentalist arrogating to himself the right to regulate how you eat and heat and breathe lest your sinful vapours sully the planet. Sure, these events might be unlikely/trifling/easily worked around, and it's not like space is without its perils. I'm still sure that a big part of the visceral appeal of the frontier is the idea that you can actually escape this and go somewhere where nobody can argue that you owe them anything, because many people's psychology is such that losing their house to unfeeling nature is bearable in a way in which losing their house to a smug and self-righteous sentient being is not; and conversely a large amount of the opposition to it seems to me to be carried by lazy rationalisation (wasteful! won't help you against the gamma ray burst anyway! why don't you start in the deep sea!) for what is really a visceral aversion against the same (because there is no greater hubris than plotting to escape the great web of obligations).

Of course in reality it’s all bullshit, space colonization is one of the greatest wastes of resources imaginable.

Man does not live on bread alone. Space colonization is and always has been about presenting a compelling vision of the future, stretching our capability, captivating our imagination and giving the human race hope. That's the best reason I can think of to do anything.

Terraforming would take thousands or tens of thousands of years with technology we can scarcely imagine

I've heard much shorter time spans suggested for terraforming Mars, on the order of a century or two. That would involve cometary bombardment to restore surface oceans, which would be mildly inconvenient for anyone on the surface.

Other reasonable candidates include Venus (reversing the greenhouse effect), or Europa (living in one ocean is much the same as any other).

Still bad ideas, when orbital living is far more convenient, especially when you're doing ISRU off asteroids.

And with the human population likely to peak in the next century anyway, there are no pressing Malthusian concerns for humanity, earth will still be pretty empty even with 10 billion humans.

We're on track for 10/11 billion people with business as usual forecasting. That is almost certainly not going to happen, things will go either very well or very poorly.

I strongly expect that AGI will bypass the physical and memetic restrictions on population growth we currently face, in a world of artificial wombs, robot nannies and so on, children will cease to be the same timesinks they are today, and that will likely emancipate us from concerns about biological clocks and women not having as many kids as they claim to want.

Further, if we're immensely richer too, and I don't see how we couldn't be, we can have as many kids as we like, without compromising QOL.

That's completely ignoring things like mind uploading, which renders population growth largely a function of energy availability.

Further, if we're immensely richer too, and I don't see how we couldn't be

Look at today. Now we have billionaires, and I remember back in the day when a millionaire was a big deal. Now a million is only routine money (for a certain subset of people). National budgets are hitting trillions. We are immensely rich already.

And yet.

There are a lot of poor people still. There are a lot of people working good jobs who are still "I can't afford two kids" or "I don't know where the money goes, I'm not a spendthrift, and yet prices are going up and it's harder to pay the bills". Now owning a house, never mind having as many kids as you like, is the impossible dream.

Why should The Future be any different? The rich get richer, some of that trickles down, and the rest of us keep on going. The irony being, I think if you compared a middle-class family today with one from a hundred years ago, today's family is way richer and has more material goods and a higher standard of living - but which of the two of them can afford more children, you tell me.

Except poor people have more children than rich people, at least until the very high end of the income distribution.

Look at today. Now we have billionaires, and I remember back in the day when a millionaire was a big deal. Now a million is only routine money (for a certain subset of people). National budgets are hitting trillions. We are immensely rich already.

Inflation means that's a million doesn't mean what it used to.

There are a lot of poor people still. There are a lot of people working good jobs who are still "I can't afford two kids" or "I don't know where the money goes, I'm not a spendthrift, and yet prices are going up and it's harder to pay the bills". Now owning a house, never mind having as many kids as you like, is the impossible dream.

There are a lot fewer poor people around. Humanity has indeed become incredibly rich, and poverty rates have plummeted.

The problem you mention is largely that of psychology, because humans have raised more children on less in the past, and still do so in most of the world.

Why should The Future be any different? The rich get richer, some of that trickles down, and the rest of us keep on going. The irony being, I think if you compared a middle-class family today with one from a hundred years ago, today's family is way richer and has more material goods and a higher standard of living - but which of the two of them can afford more children, you tell me.

The same reason some person on welfare in the US today leads a better life than most medieval peasants or even Victorian gentry. They have electricity, healthcare that works, cars and the like.

As Jesus said, "For you have the poor with you always". Poverty isn't a measure of absolute wealth but a measure of relative wealth. Taking some measures of absolute poverty the number of people in extreme poverty (under a real $2.15/day has dropped from over 2 billion to under 600 million people). There will never beaffordable positional goods for everyone, because as soon as construction ended many of the people would only value the ones not near themselves.

As one of the more ardent transhumanists on The Motte, I suppose I have to crack my neck and get to addressing all of this:

Now I think space frontiers should be explored, but we do run up against some pretty hard problems here. The most utopian visions, creating a fully viable atmosphere and water rich environment would seem to be somewhat fanciful. The second choice, some kind of resource-supported colony would seem to require inordinate resourcing and even then you've just got people living indoors, in a desert, not really much to inspire the human race with. Also what happens at this colony, who runs it, owns out- I don't think anyone thinks it would run any better than the systems we have already but I guess as a last resort to nuclear fallout and environmental catastrophe it bears thinking about. But again, not really very inspiring vision here.

I think planetary colonization or terraforming is a fool's errand myself. The only reason I support Musk in his attempts is that they contingently reduce launch costs and make the following easier (and it's fucking cool)-

Far better to build space habitats, and run them off asteroid mining.

Even in the case of something like an asteroid impact or nuclear apocalypse, Earth would remain more inhabitable than Mars. For a more realistic x-risk like AGI, there's nowhere that's safe, short of being aboard a probe travelling at 99.99% the speed of light to intergalactic space, and we're not building any of those in time.

Of course, we'll eventually fill up Earth, even with baseline humans, so the idea of filling up the cosmos instead will be necessary in some form. There's a lot of starlight illuminating empty rooms, and better to use negentropy we can't store instead of letting it go to waste.

The technical challenges of this are immense, as to how you maintain function while in the frozen state. It's not only the fracturing problem in freeze, thaw it's the lack of the electrical, chemical signalling on which neurones are formed and maintained. I'd go as far to say it's a modal confusion of what we are, which is a process more than a thing. But perhaps I'm not being sufficiently visionary in the technology.

Cryonics is hardly a proven technology, but even a minuscule chance (1-5%?) of reviving after death beats the big fat zero default of letting your body thaw and rot.

(Before some idiot brings this up as an example of Pascal's Wager or Mugging, those deal with infinitesimal probabilities, 1%, while small, is very much not negligible)

I don't plan on doing it myself, but only because I expect AGI to either kill us or provide more robust means of life extension in the next decade. I'm not dropping dead of senescence by then, and I have more pressing needs.

Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so. Curiosity is one thing, but living in a different era, what sort of culture shock would that be like, how our if place would you be, and living forever would be equivalent to hell as far as I'm concerned, similar with Rice's vampires.

This is a profound failure of imagination. What makes 80 the most optimal lifespan to live?

Would society collapse if average life expectancy made it to a 100? 120? 150?

Humans have gone through far more tumultuous transitions, and eventually we'll ponder how people could ever have been so stupid as to not solve death and aging the moment they had a real shot at it.

Personally? I like living, and that's enough. And it's hard to do much of anything if you're not alive, and I'm far from exhausting all the possibilities.

Not that I'd go so far as to mandate immortality. As far as I'm concerned, life comes with exit rights, and if you tire of living, you have every rights to call it quits.

The reason the elderly often become unhappy is because they are unhealthy. They suffer from cognitive deficits, feel all kinds of aches and pains, and watch their peers inevitably slide into the grave. None of these apply to a 80 year old with the body and mind of someone a quarter their age.

Further, as a doctor, I am uniquely positioned to see how much, by revealed preferences, people are willing to spend to extend their lives by the few paltry years that modern medicine allows, and thus can see for myself that almost everyone puts a massive premium on lifespan. Unlike most other doctors, I'm lucid enough to not knot myself into false quandaries when gasp, our medicine and surgery actually lets people live longer and longer.

Medicine is transhumanism. All doctors rage against the dying of the light, and that's one of the few invincible pillars of nobility that makes me proud of the profession.

So to my mind, and possibly uninformed view this transhumanism is a utopian distraction from the issues of the day and a failure to think about true transcendence through a more spiritual realm. It is exactly the sort of mistaken thinking our late-stage secular materialist society would make when faced with the existential problems of today. And frankly it seems lazy, rather than explore philosophical questions around what it is to be a man/woman or what identity is, it acts as a catch-all macguffin type thing.

To put it bluntly, I think "true transcendence through a more spiritual realm" is nonsense, or at least cope, and what's worse, it's outdated cope, when we finally have the tools to do better.

Telling a medieval peasant about cryogenic life extension or AGI does absolutely nothing for them, while drugging them with the opiate of the masses at least dulls the pain. But we're not medieval peasants, we're at the cusp of real apotheosis, and regardless of whether we live or die, I'm glad I was around for the ride.

And frankly it seems lazy, rather than explore philosophical questions around what it is to be a man/woman or what identity is, it acts as a catch-all macguffin type thing.

"What does it mean to be human? Is it down to the genes? There's so much genetic diversity, can the mere conversion of a few proto-oncogenes into oncogenes deprive one of one's human rights? It seems lazy to simply cut and throw them away, instead of exploring what it actually is to be human"

Says the insane parson trying to stop the neurosurgeon from resecting their brain tumour.

My God man, how can you call it lazy to solve or render obsolete such a massive problem, when to date all the bloviating and moralizing by philosophers has been incredibly more lazy, or at least profoundly useless, because we haven't gotten anything out of it?

I can actually see the appeal in pushing out the age, it's one of those things where the desire to get more may creep up once you get closer to the time. As long as you have health but then that would presumably go hand in hand with the life-extending capability. I might be part of a minority - for me, knowing I'm going to die one day gives me great solace! And I like the idea of life stages, childhood - youth - middle age - old age and all the changes in perspective that go with it. I'd rather the 2-3 really good seasons and finish up, than the meandering season after season for the sake of it. But perhaps that's not a fair analogy.

I agree, the spiritual transcendence is acting here as a total macguffin! I'm still working on this admittedly but it's in the scientific frame I'm thinking of ...

I'm not sure on your last point. I assume it's around why would you withhold treatment if it works. While I don't rule out cosmetic sex change as being effective for some people my contention is that there might be something else that works and that so much is downstream of culture. These ideas are so new and therefore contingent. I don't see lifestyle diversity/identity optimisation as the holy grail as I think it's operating at a fairly superficial layer. It feels to me like one of the dead-ends of modern liberalism, a symptom of ennui.

I might be part of a minority - for me, knowing I'm going to die one day gives me great solace!

I find that idea rather perverse, but like I said, your choice to die is entirely up to you in my eyes. I simply resent dying one nanosecond before I choose to.

Do you want to kill yourself right now? I doubt it and I doubt you will when you actually turn 80 either. Being healthy and wealthy has a rather pronounced effect on mental wellbeing.

And I like the idea of life stages, childhood - youth - middle age - old age

I have little doubt that we'll invent new and interesting categories when people live long enough for that to be useful. After all, a centenarian's club would have been an awfully empty place for most of human history.

I'm not sure on your last point. I assume it's around why would you withhold treatment if it works.

I meant it in the sense that it's a billion times more laudable to eliminate a problem than it is to spend an eternity sitting around debating it and never making any useful progress.

There's no firm consensus definition of "human", but that doesn't mean we complain when cancer cells aren't given human rights.

At any rate, a lot of our moral confusion about gender will be entirely obsolete when we can switch it at will, and I think it's crazy to frame that as a bad thing!

Well there's a lot of interesting things to do and see so I wouldn't rule out being persuaded for another chunk of 20 or so, and I admit there's a slippery slope there. But finitude has its own motivation - my knowledge of death encourages me to try and 'lay it on the line', notwithstanding my desires for comfort and ease.

As to assuaging moral confusion, isn't transhumanism just operating as some cosmic consequentialism? Don't worry about the petty ethical concerns of the day such as unnecessary surgeries, the utopia of the future will render them moot. Once we get bored by the ubiquity of sex change we will realise the futility of such an identity focus ...

It's also so open ended it raises questions around how meaning is possible.

If we're eventually going to fill up Earth, why bother reviving the corpsicles? The majority of them are just more dull, weak, stupid humans from the past. We have plenty of new humans if we want more humans, and those are ones who are better fitted for our society.

I think there's a lot of contradiction in the transhumanist ideals, and that's normal, but someone really should address "We're gonna have so many people on Earth we have to create space colonies and settle other planets" with "We can solve the problem of cryonics and revive people from now to live in the future where life extension is also a mostly solved problem".

I expect AGI to either kill us or provide more robust means of life extension in the next decade.

And the 40s and 50s techno-optimists expected we'd have lunar colonies, Mars colonies, and be travelling to other star systems by now. Be careful what you expect is going to happen in the near future, it hardly ever happens as we forecast it would.

None of these apply to a 80 year old with the body and mind of someone a quarter their age.

Two different problems there: life extension past what we currently consider the 'normal' limits (e.g. making sure most people will live to be 100) and reversing the effects of aging (you still die in your 80s but you remain fit and healthy as a 40 year old up to then). Think of Swift's Struldbruggs; what do you think people would choose, given the fear of death, between "you will live another 20-30 years but keep getting older" or "you will stay in your 40 year old state of health up till you die, but you die at 70-80 as usual"? Some people will pick the extra time, some people will pick the healthier body.

But we're not medieval peasants, we're at the cusp of real apotheosis

That's an amount of hubris that makes me laugh. Come back when you're 60 and few of your confident predictions have come true. The one thing that happens is that as we get to know more, we realise how much more complicated the problems are (space colonies! solving aging!) than the early optimism of the day imagined (we're so smart now and know so much, surely in 10/20/50 years we will know everything!)

Says the insane parson trying to stop the neurosurgeon from resecting their brain tumour.

So you're comparing being trans to - having a brain tumour? Are you sure you want to be quoted on that? 😁

If we're eventually going to fill up Earth, why bother reviving the corpsicles? The majority of them are just more dull, weak, stupid humans from the past. We have plenty of new humans if we want more humans, and those are ones who are better fitted for our society.

There's a reason I suggested a 1% chance of ever coming back, but surprise surprise, transhumanists, like their merely "humanist" kin, are capable of charity.

At a point in time where we can actually do this, it's not going to cost much for the living.

And the 40s and 50s techno-optimists expected we'd have lunar colonies, Mars colonies, and be travelling to other star systems by now. Be careful what you expect is going to happen in the near future, it hardly ever happens as we forecast it would.

I expect reality to set us straight, not fully-generalized-pessimism.

and reversing the effects of aging (you still die in your 80s but you remain fit and healthy as a 40 year old up to then).

That is not how aging works. The only way you're going to be able to pull that off is dragging your happy and healthy grandma behind a shed and introducing her to a baseball bat.

Age is not a coat of paint, it represents trillions of accumulated failures in complicated systems, which cause a super-exponential decline in capabilities (if it was merely exponential, some people would live centuries and more, instead of us being hard capped to 120 years).

You make people healthy (also known as reversing aging) and they will live longer.

So you're comparing being trans to - having a brain tumour? Are you sure you want to be quoted on that?

More of a comparison to abortion or what it means to be human, as far as I can tell.

To put it bluntly, I think "true transcendence through a more spiritual realm" is nonsense, or at least cope, and what's worse, it's outdated cope, when we finally have the tools to do better.

I'm sad you think this way. Whether it's an artifact of the way human minds have evolved or whatever the case may be, there is definitely something there. We can argue about whether there's an actual big old God sitting outside of time somewhere, but mystical experiences and relationships with the divine are as real as it gets. These experiences of something greater than ourselves are really what binds all human civilization together. It's what lifted us out of the murk and gave us consciousness, as far as I can tell. That's something worth worshipping.

There's a lot to get in there my dude, and I'm not sufficiently qualified on neuroscience (I slept through the lectures, not that they went that deep) to give a full explanation of how religious ideation arises from the brain.

I still know that sufferers of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy see visions and can even speak in tongues, and instead of worshipping them, we get them psychiatric help these days.

The limbic area is also distinctly associated with religiosity in general.

I honestly see nothing about the human condition that is well explained by religion being true, and a great deal that speaks for the other side.

What loving, omnipotent and omniscient God lets children with ichthyosis vulgaris exist as more than a fevered dream of horror in the imagination of overactive biologists? (I suggest you don't Google what that looks like).

If there's solace to be had in religion, I don't want or need it. My only standard is whether its true, and the believers haven't brought me around nor are they likely to until we make gods ourselves, not that we should workship them, quite the opposite if we have their source code.

My only standard is whether its true, and the believers haven't brought me around nor are they likely to until we make gods ourselves

No worries! I don't want to stop ya in any way of your transhumanist dreams to be clear. Heck, I may still even join you. The jury is out.

I just want to convince you and your fellow machine gods to spare the poor humans who want to stick to their physical bodies and worship some sort of God.

I just want to convince you and your fellow machine gods to spare the poor humans who want to stick to their physical bodies and worship some sort of God.

I'm not homicidal myself, as much as I pity the religious, I don't think the solution is euthanasia haha.

Can't vouch for the Machine Gods, you'll need to take that up with Altman!

Cryonics is hardly a proven technology, but even a minuscule chance (1-5%?) of reviving after death beats the big fat zero default of letting your body thaw and rot.

(Before some idiot brings this up as an example of Pascal's Wager or Mugging, those deal with infinitesimal probabilities, 1%, while small, is very much not negligible)

Estimating 1-5% revival chance for current cryonics seems awfully optimistic.

I would put it below 0.001% chance or lower.

Our understanding of the way information is stored in the brain is limited. I enjoyed this article from 2015, but even it is largely speculative, we have no idea if 'engrams' exist, we presume they do and presume to understand how they're stored.

What seems likely is that would be technically possible (at some current or future level of technology that we haven't yet ascertained) to preserve the brain such that its memory/personality content is maintained for possible future extraction or revival. We don't know for a fact whether the current most advanced forms of cryonics preserve any of this information, although it seems extremely unlikely that they do. But stranger things have happened, science advances extraordinarily rapidly, and who knows what superintelligent AI might make of the problem of a cryogenically frozen brain.

"Uploading" is even easier. There are probably already some reality television personalities for whom enough video footage of their daily life exists to train a future-generation multimodal LLM (attached to additional synthesis tools) to fully recreate their personality to an indistinguishable degree. You don't need to upload your brain, you just need to train a model to be you.

What seems likely is that would be technically possible (at some current or future level of technology that we haven't yet ascertained) to preserve the brain such that its memory/personality content is maintained for possible future extraction or revival.

It seems possible. Claiming that current preservation methods will allow resurrection seems wild and extremely unlikely. Someone claiming that estimating resurrection chance at 5% for currently frozen brain seems extremely miscalibrated for me.

to fully recreate their personality to an indistinguishable degree. You don't need to upload your brain, you just need to train a model to be you.

Someone with personality mimicking me is not me. The same goes for photo of me and mirror image of me and so on.

Someone with personality mimicking me is not me. The same goes for photo of me and mirror image of me and so on.

I disagree. A model that can perfectly predict what you would do at any moment and in response to any stimulus is you in every appreciable sense.

  1. even if they would be atom-by-atom identical then they would still not be me

  2. "you just need to train a model to be you" is insufficient to reach "model that can perfectly predict what you would do at any moment and in response to any stimulus"

I certainly won't appreciate it, so it isn't.

In every appreciable sense. In other words, a perfect copy of me would seem exactly the same to everyone else but if I had them standing in front of me I would be very sure they aren’t me. And if they killed me I would be dead.

Of course, having a legacy copy of you walking around might be considered better than nothing.

There are probably already some reality television personalities for whom enough video footage of their daily life exists to train a future-generation multimodal LLM (attached to additional synthesis tools) to fully recreate their personality to an indistinguishable degree.

That is simultaneously pathetic and horrible. So build an automaton that says the things you have been recorded saying, does the things you have been recorded doing, and never mind if you die because we'll all pretend - or worse, believe - this doll is really you.

A civilisation of puppets all playing pre-recorded roles forever and ever, engendering nothing new, after the last real human died and is now a heap of bones. But don't worry, their puppet exists so it's really them, honestly!

More to the point, we already have a beautiful planet with an atmosphere, water and abundant resources - shouldn't the utopian impulse make us redouble our efforts for poor old Earth, instead of giving the glad eye to some ugly red rock?

It seems reductive to call the desire for a space exploration age utopian. It's not a utopia people want, it's a frontier. Somewhere a young man with little social standing or assets can risk his life to make it big in new, unknown territory. The demographics of people who would sign up for a one-way Mars colonization trip are the same as the people who try to make it big gambling on stocks and crypto. Crypto is a sad excuse for a real frontier for many reasons, but it's the closest thing I can think of in the modern day.

People want more space to spread out and get away from the current social structure. A lot of the most disaffected or persecuted people in Europe were able to do this with the Americas, and right now we lack this kind of physical release valve. I think a lot of social problems would solve themselves if people who were unhappy with things could just go... somewhere else.

It's very possible that space travel looks nothing like that, and will only take highly skilled and educated individuals. Still, most frontiers are inherently dangerous, so I'd bet there is some place for those with everything to gain and nothing to lose to find their fortune.

Of course both are possible but you do have to wonder about distracting focus.

The space race generated/improved countless technologies that vastly improved quality of life back on Earth. A new wave of interest in space would almost certainly result in new material gains here. If asteroid mining is possible in the long term, it could solve a lot of resource problems and lead to an explosion in wealth gains like no other. If by utopia, you mean spiritual transcendence, then yeah this probably wouldn't help with that.

I just don't see the appeal to this idea, and the fetish around changing sex or being something other than what you are already. It seems like a dystopia to be so focused on the surface aspects of Self when we could imagine a world where your sex is less relevant.

My issue with transgenderism is the "point deer, make horse" of social pressure to affirm that someone who is clearly not a woman is a woman, and of pushing dangerous, irreversible medical interventions onto autistic and underage people. Philosophically, I'm not against the concept of changing your body and hormones to be the same as a woman's, were it possible to actually do so. I'm not willing to bet that medicine will ever figure this out 100%, but if it does, that's a good thing.

Sex change isn't your thing, but are you against other forms of bodily modification? Do you have no issues with your health or vanity that you'd be willing to medically fix/improve if it were cheap and easy enough?

I guess ultimately I might have a different definition of transhumanism than you. At its core, it seems like the concept of using technology to overcome failings of the body. We've been doing that since we first picked up a walking stick. If in the future, the cure for blindness is to install vat-grown eyes, I don't see that as much different than LASIK, or even from wearing glasses. In all examples, your genetics or life circumstances led to you having the bad hand of poor eyesight, and you're relying on an unnatural intervention to overcome that.

I admit it looks pretty silly when you look at Yud talking about Cryonics and living forever. I wouldn't recommending holding out for technology to fix everything as an excuse to ignore your physical fitness. I'm not holding my breath for space travel, extreme body modification, etc. But at the same time, if you were to tell a man with poor eyesight from 100 BC that in the future, we could fire lasers into his eye to reshape his cornea, he would probably dismiss that as magical thinking in the same way that you are with some of your examples. These things don't always pan out how we want them to. But sometimes they do.

I think you raise an important point about frontier spirit, which I consider one of the problems we are facing, that modern life in many ways is ill-fitted to our nature.

I think you might want to think a bit more carefully about what kind of people we send on missions though. I think modified humans that have been engineered for cooperative behaviour might be a safer bet than 'wild-west' types. I don't know if you are familiar with the mutiny on the bounty tale at all, though to their credit the colony survived even if everyone is now related to Christian Fletcher...

As to medical improvements, I'm for them- I could be persuaded of a reasonable amount in this domain. Cosmetic procedures I would endure if there's a good reason, an unsightly mole but not really anything at the next level. I'm in the norms of feature proportions as far as I can tell so haven't had the need. I seem to get uglier year on year but don't notice for large periods of time so it's no biggie. Full-body tattoos are good for Yakuza etc

My concern around the impulse for sex change in some people is part of it may be originating in cultural ideas. I contend it's better perhaps to change the cultural space rather than mainstream cosmetic surgery.

Still, most frontiers are inherently dangerous, so I'd bet there is some place for those with everything to gain and nothing to lose to find their fortune.

The problem is, that the technology needed for the high frontier is so high, by the time we get it operational to create those Mars domes there will be nothing for a guy who can drive a lorry to do there. We'll have robot diggers etc.

In the 17th-19th centuries, the disaffected guy with nothing more than his manual labour to offer could scratch out some kind of living on the frontier wielding a shovel or working on a ranch. For a Mars colony, what is a guy with a shovel to do? He can't strike out on his own for the gold diggings or claim a land grant for a farm of his own, since everyone will be dependent on technology to live from breathable air onwards. And that means living in organised settlements en masse, no solitary prospector wandering the hills. If the social problems arise out of "he can't stop getting into fights with other people, unless he lives on his own" then they'll be transplanted right along with the disaffected.

It's not a utopia people want, it's a frontier. Somewhere a young man with little social standing or assets can risk his life to make it big in new, unknown territory.

But as you know, America is so rich that those possibilities on earth just aren’t attractive to the young American man anymore. He can go work in fracking in North Dakota, he can go work on an oil rig, he can get a qualification in some mining-related field and go work in Sierra Leone or the DRC, all these places have room for ambitious young western men if they’re willing to do what it takes. Parts of Southeast Asia are ‘booming’ if you’re in the right spaces in tech or finance.

But the modal young American man is too comfortable. He’s too comfortable because his ancestors won and he really did grow up in a fantastically prosperous society where all you need to do is study computer science and learn how to program (trivially easy) and you can make a comfortable living and essentially enjoy an easy and materially prosperous life. America is a place where trivial email jobs pay $100k a year. The young man doesn’t leave because, by being born an American, he has already won the lottery of life.

What the crypto gamblers really want to be is rich. But very few Irish or German peasants in 1850 who emigrated to the US became wealthy or anything even close to it. So the ‘frontier’ argument is really just a delusional fantasy of LARPing as a gold prospector from a Hollywood movie who strikes it rich. That’s as realistic today as it was 200 years ago, which is to say not very.

I'm certainly staying put even if they started taking recruits for the Mars colony tomorrow. But I don't mind taking the office job route you talked about, and I plan to get engaged soon. The pot is sweet enough in America that you can just coast if you're a certain type. That said:

all you need to do is study computer science and learn how to program (trivially easy) and you can make a comfortable living and essentially enjoy an easy and materially prosperous life. America is a place where trivial email jobs pay $100k a year. The young man doesn’t leave because, by being born an American, he has already won the lottery of life.

Come on. This is not trivially easy. It's easy if you have a high enough IQ and can put up with school and office life for 80% of your life. Even if we're talking about email jobs, that still selects for a certain level of agreeableness and conscientiousness. There are many people who simply lack the cognitive horsepower for this kind of work, and there's a large group of people for whom this is a living hell. I don't mind the work, but you must agree the modal office environment is very feminine.

My college friends are all capable of and okay with this route, but I have a lot of other friends from different backgrounds that this is not a viable path for. In any society, there will be people unhappy with the current order, but the rising trend in sexlessness and radicalism indicates that there are more unsatisfied people than normal right now. If there were a compelling alternative path, I think there'd be a lot less societal stress from men with unfulfilling lives.

Yeah that's a fantasy, and there are many good arguments for why space can't be the escape valve for those people, but my point was that such space aspirations were a frontier fantasy, not a utopian fantasy as OP was saying.

But very few Irish or German peasants in 1850 who emigrated to the US became wealthy or anything even close to it.

Their earnings potential was much better in America, no? That's why they came. They wouldn't die rich by the standards of landed European money, but they'd be wealthier than they ever would have been had they stayed in Europe. There was a legitimate reason to go, because there was a lot of "unclaimed" land and opportunity to die with some land and money, not a landless serf.

Ahh yes Computer Science the easy major that 50% of people drop out of after their first year.

Or programming so easy of a profession that the practitioners get paid just because those slimy software engineers conned us all.

Link your github or gtfo.

Becoming a FAANG dev or majoring in computer science at Stanford is hard. Going to a bootcamp and doing basic data science python stuff for a plain old corporation that pays $105k a year in the burbs of some Sun Belt City isnt. But I think you’re getting distracted, because my focus wasn’t just on tech but on ‘email jobs’.

Do you think millennial girlbosses in HR or ‘Product Marketing Managers’ are doing an ultra-challenging job intellectually? Because they all make decent money too.

Its been a decade since anyone could get a software job by knowing html,css and js. And do you really think Dunder Mifflin Paper company has Data Scientists working for them when their "database" is most likely an excel sheet? Your conception of working in tech is based off of reddit comments.

Anyways, I dont think professional email senders do much intellectual work, neither do bankers or any non STEM white collar workers for that matter. Its class warfare. But I dont really lose sleep over it because I trust demand and supply.

learn how to program (trivially easy)

For some. If you have the maths ability and the kind of mind that works for programming, you can do that. The likes of me? You could not beat it into me with sticks (literally).

But as you know, America is so rich that those possibilities on earth just aren’t attractive to the young American man anymore. He can go work in fracking in North Dakota, he can go work on an oil rig,

There's nothing new or unknown about either of them, and lots of men do them.

go work in Sierra Leone or the DRC, all these places have room for ambitious young western men if they’re willing to do what it takes. Parts of Southeast Asia are ‘booming’ if you’re in the right spaces in tech or finance.

Frontiers have potential; the DRC is a basket case and is known to be. Trying to "do what it takes" there would be like trying to homestead during the Dust Bowl. Southeast Asia, of course, is absolutely packed with people.

He’s too comfortable because his ancestors won and he really did grow up in a fantastically prosperous society where all you need to do is study computer science and learn how to program (trivially easy) and you can make a comfortable living and essentially enjoy an easy and materially prosperous life.

Very broadly drawn, there's less than 6 million professional programmers in the US, out of 158 million total employed. It's certainly not trivially easy to do so; if it were, more people would do it and drive the salary down. Furthermore, it doesn't help; while it is far more comfortable than fracking or working on an oil rig, like those jobs it provides money without status, or perhaps even negative status. There was a short time this was changing, though only for the top of the profession, but it did not last.

What the crypto gamblers really want to be is rich.

Not just rich, but rich in a flashy and impressive way. Get rich by making a good salary and investing the money in normal stuff, you're boring. Get rich by joining a tech startup and hitting the IPO jackpot, and unless you reach Sergey Brin levels of rich, you're just weird (Brin is weird but rich enough that it doesn't matter). Get rich by throwing your life savings into a meme stock or shitcoin and hitting it big, and you're exciting. Winning gamblers are just inherently higher status than winners who got their money more conservatively. Losing gamblers are, of course, losers, but even they might be higher status on the way down.

Yeah but by definition this isn’t really a solution. If all young men want to do is gamble with infinitesimally small odds of great wealth, they can play the lottery. A comfortable, happy life is within reach of most young American men. A 99.99th percentile life is, by definition, not. And it wasn’t in the ‘age of the frontier’ either.

So you understand your proposals don't work and you're just suggesting young men eat cake?

The lottery doesn't work for various obvious reasons either.

My point is that you can’t really define what was actually unique about the ‘Wild West’ that makes it impossible to replicate today.

If it’s about gambling on a tiny chance of getting rich, you can do that.

If it’s about working hard to provide a comfortable life for your family, you can do that.

If it’s about living somewhere rural and remote, living off the land, homeschooling your kids, you can still do that in many parts of the US (and for relatively little money if you’re not picky).

If you want to live some kind of outlaw criminal fantasy, then again, you can do it - and just like it did for most outlaws in the Wild West, it’ll probably end badly.

So what, specifically, is it that’s been lost? You don’t seem able to actually describe the option that young men today don’t have that they once did.

So what, specifically, is it that’s been lost? You don’t seem able to actually describe the option that young men today don’t have that they once did.

What has been lost is the true belief in God that compelled people to have hope that such a drastic move could lead to a better life. Remember that the majority of the settlers were Christians who were so devout they were willing to cross an ocean and take incredible risks, leaving behind everything they've ever known to go to a new land. There's a reason those people were selected.

My point is that you can’t really define what was actually unique about the ‘Wild West’ that makes it impossible to replicate today.

You know, though, that the substitutions you are suggesting meets some technical definition while missing the essence. Playing the lottery isn't the same as prospecting for gold, even if both are "gambling on a tiny chance of getting rich". Working as a corporate drone isn't the same as working as a cattle driver or even running a store.

I’m not trying to be facetious.

My point is that the difference between then and now is mainly a product of huge increases in total societal prosperity. 2/3 of your examples (working on a cattle ranch and running a store) are totally possible today, it’s just most people don’t want to do them because they’re hard work and poorly paid compared to a lot of other stuff you could do.

Most men didn’t seek their fortune in the West as some kind of grand adventure, they did it because they were desperate and poor, because life in the urban tenements of the East Coast was intolerable, because they held out hope for a small fraction of the quality of life that the average American has today.

You’re romanticizing what in many ways was the historical equivalent of Nigerien migrants crossing the Mediterranean in unseaworthy dinghies in the hope that they become soccer champions. A sad phenomenon that modern young Western men need not take part in because they have already won the birth lottery.

More comments

The young man doesn’t leave because, by being born an American, he has already won the lottery of life.

God bless America. Sometimes I forget how damn lucky I am. Thanks for reminding me.

all you need to do is study computer science and learn how to program (trivially easy)

it is trivially easy for some (including me) but not to all, and no - it is not only about intelligence

But as you know, America is so rich that those possibilities on earth just aren’t attractive to the young American man anymore. He can go work in fracking in North Dakota, he can go work on an oil rig, he can get a qualification in some mining-related field and go work in Sierra Leone or the DRC, all these places have room for ambitious young western men if they’re willing to do what it takes. Parts of Southeast Asia are ‘booming’ if you’re in the right spaces in tech or finance.

None of these places are frontiers. They offer no respite from people telling you what to do and how to do it, and that's like 80% of the appeal.

The wilderness may have no people telling you what to do and how to do it, but it has Nature telling you so, and Nature can be far crueler and more demanding than any human tyrant. Although I suppose that depending on your personality and temperament it could still be more tolerable.

The nice part about Nature is that she follows the letter of the law rather than the spirit, and doesn't care if you outwit her. Find a way to exploit Nature's laws and you just win: find a way to exploit a human's laws, and those laws will change quite quickly.

True, and fair enough.

The actual frontier never had that either, there was always government in the Wild West. Unless you’re talking about the outlaw fantasy (organized crime is still pretty big today, so that’s certainly doable), the inhabitants of the old west lived under a system of government that was substantial, backed by military force and involved the weight of legal, social and cultural expectation in almost every aspect of life; it was, if anything, a more conformist society than the present.

There's government that's going to bother to look for you and make sure you're doing everything exactly the way they want it, and there's government that won't. No one would have arrested you for finding a free plot of land and starting a farm (though you might end up getting screwed once "civilization" expands, and your land becomes interesting, I suppose.)

I was unaware that they brought back the homestead act.

I think it’s utopian in the sense that most people have wildly utopian and really do not understand the dangers of both exploration and colonization. They’re basing their ideas on TV and movies where space travel is barely more dangerous than a cruise ship and has better food. Where colonies are easy to build and maintain and don’t require any inputs from earth.

The real universe is not like this of course. If everything goes right, you’ll ride in a tiny cramped and probably cold ship to a tiny colony entirely supported from earth (with costs in the trillions or at least high billions per year) where you do basically manual labor and spend several hours a week on top of that maintaining the structure of the biosphere or farming. Basically, the gestalt image should not be Picard on the bridge sipping an earl grey tea, but the very early days of colonizing the new world. Many will die, and those who don’t are going to be doing a lot of very hard work.

true transcendence through a more spiritual realm

What about uploading?

As far as I'm concerned, that's the essence and goal of transhumanism. Everything else is a distraction. We move swiftly on to posthumanism, building bodies to our liking. You do a neuron-by-neuron gradual, conscious replacement of everything in your brain with transistors or whatever computing material we use by then. Once you're machine-legible, you can either stay in VR or print out a new body and install your brain, or you copy yourself massively, or you add on new capabilities digitally (ranging from Matrix-style accelerated learning to fundamentally increasing one's speed and depth of thought). Or some combination of these.

Now there are formidable technical and political/practical problems with this vision. Who knows how easy it is to augment one's own mind? Will more than 0.001% of the population survive to see this? Does AI eat us for breakfast before we even have a chance to kill each other?

But, if our species survives, there is no alternative to leaving fleshy humanity behind. There's nothing an organic human can do better than a posthuman, uploaded being drawing upon more energy, more mass, more resources. They would be able to think faster, act faster, reproduce faster, be more intelligent, more powerful, more resilient. There's no way our 20 watt brains are at the peak of what's physically possible, less so our bodies.

Imagine being a legacy human in an era of posthumans. You're constantly watched in ways you can't even understand, let alone counterattack. You have no sovereignty, no power, no ability to participate in a cultural life that's beyond the capacity of your senses and intellect. You might as well be a zoo animal. There is no escape except death. If you get on a starship to explore the universe, posthumans will already have gotten there first. You're not going to outrun smaller, faster hardier mechanical bodies. It would be an extremely sad existence to my mind.

I chose the words 'machine-legible' precisely because I know that it epitomizes what some people here don't like. But there are irresistible competitive forces pushing us in this direction. I don't think Ted Kaczynski's vision of technological regression is possible. People naturally want wealth, power, fun, longevity and status. The Epic of Gilgamesh is, to to some extent, a search for immortality. This impulse is deep-seated. People are always going to try to transcend their biological limits and see what they can truly do. Technology isn't going to give us just Star Trek's glass spires and cool toys, it's not going to culminate with a civilization that primarily caters to jumped-up apes.

Take terraforming Mars. The whole idea assumes that humans need water, certain temperature ranges, oxygen, gravity, planets... Why accept such restraints? Why not flock to orbit the stars that provide all this free energy? Why should people live on Earth when they could live on the orbit of Mercury, or closer to the Sun? Isn't it more habitable there? Why should we see Mars as a planet for living on, when it could be cubic kilometres of construction material, inconveniently sitting at the bottom of a gravity well? That's real transhumanism in my book, a radical change to how one sees the world. And it's backed by trend lines in GDP, computing power and so on - every hockey-stick graph that shows us at unprecedented growth.

You're not going to outrun smaller, faster hardier mechanical bodies.

Sure, but those minds are still dependent upon a physical substrate. The uploaded mind isn't floating around in the ether, it's stored in some fashion on a physical computer or in a robot body. And if the machine stops...

But the Committee of the Mending Apparatus now came forward, and allayed the panic with well-chosen words. It confessed that the Mending Apparatus was itself in need of repair.

The effect of this frank confession was admirable.

'Of course,' said a famous lecturer – he of the French Revolution, who gilded each new decay with splendour – 'of course we shall not press our complaints now. The Mending Apparatus has treated us so well in the past that we all sympathize with it, and will wait patiently for its recovery. In its own good time it will resume its duties. Meanwhile let us do without our beds, our tabloids, our other little wants. Such, I feel sure, would be the wish of the Machine.' Thousands of miles away his audience applauded. The Machine still linked them. Under the seas, beneath the roots of the mountains, ran the wires through which they saw and heard, the enormous eyes and ears that were their heritage, and the hum of many workings clothed their thoughts in one garment of subserviency. Only the old and the sick remained ungrateful, for it was rumoured that Euthanasia, too, was out of order, and that pain had reappeared among men.

What about uploading?

Say an LLM trainer (hypothetical future robot-AI-thing) followed you around for 10 years, recording everything you did and said, and then recreated your personality, worldview and identity perfectly, such that you could present it with any problem or situation and it would react the way 'you' would.

Would you kill yourself, safe in the knowledge that you had achieved immortality? There's a viscerally unsatisfying nature to 'uploading' that can't be ignored.

There's a nice short story by Greg Egan that explores this, "Learning to Be Me". I won't spoil it, even though it's older than Russian Federation.

Sounds great, I’ll try to track it down.

I'm with the spiritualists on this one. It is making a copy and then destroying the original. Our original bodies contain an essence and a continuity of existence that is then broken. You can't Ship of Theseus your way out of this by copying neuron by neuron. The copy is not 'you'. 'You' would die in the process, or would coexist with the copy, showing clearly that you are different entities.

I'd be open to regenerative techniques such as gene therapy or even nanites to repair organic tissue indefinitely, but I wouldn't go for a cybernetic version of immortality.

To be honest I'd probably even avoid Star Trek style transporters.

Your continuity of existence is broken every night. Thousands of nerve cells die and you also lose consciousness for hours.

Unless you're a a dualists positing 'souls' that are crucial and somehow distinct from the unique pattern of information in every person's brains, you aren't making much sense.

I won't make an argument to 'souls', but I will place my stake on continuity of existence. There is some loss and gain of brain and other cells and loss of consciousness, but this is not a break in continuity of existence.

I understand this is not something I can logically convince others of. They will have to make their own decisions on what 'they' are and how 'they' can gain immortality.

The brain doesn't stop working entirely at night. I have reason to believe I wake up the same process as I was, which is completely lacking in the case of murder-teleporter, not to mention the LLM scenario.

People who blithely accept non-continuous cloning as acceptable substitute for themselves ought to experience talking to their own clone before being told that they'll be killed right now and it will live on. I think this will disabuse many of any further impulse to claim that's the same thing as going to sleep.

We have zero reason to believe anything beyond the very specific arrangements of matter determines everything about an individual, therefore a perfect copy with sufficient fidelity would be that person.

they'll be killed right now and it will live on.

Why do you think instincts have much to say about thought experiments or sufficiently advanced technology ? They don't. Instincts can't even cope with something as mundane as radiation, or orders of magnitude. We don't have instinctual facility with numbers, there's some evidence that people whose language lack the concept cannot even learn to count.

Meanwhile the survival instinct is ancient and really not that smart.

Nothing about the very specific arrangement of matter explains why there has to be an awareness behind the matter and the electrical processes of the brain. However, as long as it exists, it would be trivial to see if the perfect copy with sufficient fidelity shares that awareness with me. If it doesn't do so while I live, I'm not about to count on it doing so after I die, simple.

(You don't have to bother asking me how I know whether or not the awareness exists. It's self-evident to me and I'm not a solipsist so I don't believe yours isn't self-evident to you, either. I consider the denial of self that's common in rationalist circles to be stubborn attempts to does-not-compute reality into the bounds of their theories. Call dualists incoherent all you want, as long as you have the guts to admit you don't have the answers either.)

You do a neuron-by-neuron gradual, conscious replacement of everything in your brain

That's the point of this caveat. IMO it's still a huge gamble, but as @self_made_human discussed above, if there's even a chance it works it seems like a good gamble to make. I'm conflicted about the spiritual repercussions though.

I don't think Ted Kaczynski's vision of technological regression is possible. People naturally want wealth, power, fun, longevity and status.

It's pretty funny that a mathematician with a 150 IQ couldn't see doing away with industry was implausible from just the game theory angle, however..

Why should we see Mars as a planet for living on, when it could be cubic kilometres of construction material, inconveniently sitting at the bottom of a gravity well? That's real transhumanism in my book, a radical change to how one sees the world.

Indeed. Let me quote imo the least appreciated contemporary British philosopher:

Conspicuously missing from the public space debate, therefore, is any frank admission that, “(let’s face it folks)—planets are misallocations of matter which don’t really work. No one wants to tell you that, but it’s true. You know that we deeply respect the green movement, but when we get out there onto the main highway of solar-system redevelopment, and certain very rigid, very extreme environmentalist attitudes—Gaian survivalism, terrestrial holism, planetary preservationism, that sort of thing—are blocking the way forward, well, let me be very clear about this, that means jobs not being created, businesses not being built, factories closing down in the asteroid belt, growth foregone. Keeping the earth together means dollars down the drain—a lot of dollars, your dollars. There are people, sincere people, good people, who strongly oppose our plans to deliberately disintegrate the earth. I understand that, really I do, you know—honestly—I used to feel that way myself, not so long ago. I, too, wanted to believe that it was possible to leave this world in one piece, just as it has been for four billion years now. I, too, thought the old ways were probably best, that this planet was the place we belonged, that we should—and could—still find some alternative to pulling it apart. I remember those dreams, really I do, and I still hold them close to my heart. But, people, they were just dreams, old and noble dreams, but dreams, and today I’m here to tell you that we have to wake up. Planets aren’t our friends. They’re speed-bumps on the road to the future, and we simply can’t afford them anymore. Let’s back them up digitally, with respect, yes, even with love, and then let’s get to work …” [Thunderous applause]

entire essay in pdf ^^

Thought-provoking stuff. I wish he'd be clearer and say 'New Space is wedged between their grand, extremely based and megalomaniacal visions of stellar-scale deconstruction and the tiny, incoherent things that are politically acceptable to announce'. If that was the message. I'm not sure anybody's too certain about what Land is saying. Perhaps not even Nick himself: https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/1334309844086480896#m

In any event, it's locked in. It couldn't matter less what the hoi-polloi want - the planets will be disassembled regardless either by us, by someone or something. Or if not, then only because it's not efficient and there are more economical uses of resources.

People seem extremely keen on the "nothing ever happens" philosophy - some form of stasis.

If that was the message. I'm not sure anybody's too certain about what Land is saying.

I think he's pretty certain what he meant but I also think if you read him avidly rather than with apprehension, you're probably bonkers.

Given how things have worked out in the past, it could very well be that the project for deconstruction of planets will get off the ground at the same time someone figures out making your own pocket universes using a particle accelerator, ingenuity and an unbelievable amount of chutzpah.

Moving to Mars, space

This has virtually nothing to do with transhumanism except insofar as both involve technological advancement and thus feature in science fiction and futurism.

Changing sex

This has little to do with transhumanism except insofar as both involve altering your body with future technology. Transhumanism is centrally about making the human condition better, not sidegrades like becoming the other sex.

Freezing our body, brain to come back later

This is a small part of transhumanism in that it is a specific speculative method for using current technology to survive long enough to take advantage of possible future transhuman technology.

Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so. Curiosity is one thing, but living in a different era, what sort of culture shock would that be like, how our if place would you be, and living forever would be equivalent to hell as far as I'm concerned, similar with Rice's vampires.

This is the only part of your post about a central aspect of transhumanism.

When people are dying of some disease like cancer, or when their family and friends die, they don't want it to happen. The longevity aspect of transhumanism is just the same thing but thinking more long-term. Maybe you think you'll gladly commit suicide when you hit 80, but actual 80-year-olds don't seem inclined to do that. And certainly people don't seem to prefer death to "culture shock". Sometimes people make peace with death, but this seems to have more to do with having to accept something you can't change or it being your only remaining escape from suffering than actually being happy with it. They also don't like it when their strength or eyesight fails them, or when routine parts of life become painful or difficult. Transhumanism says that we should use technology to fix those problems if we can, the same way we have used technology to fix other perennial problems of the human condition like starving to death or nearsightedness or being eaten by wolves.

There are other aspects of transhumanism besides life extension, though as the most pressing concern it is the most prominent. Intelligence enhancement would be the second-most prominent, and is a natural extension of how we value the contributions of genius scientists/etc. and do things like implement universal education to help children be successful and contributing members of society. And then minor stuff like giving yourself extra senses or superstrength or whatever is cool but not actually important, so it often features in fiction but rarely comes up in actual transhumanist writing.

This has little to do with transhumanism except insofar as both involve altering your body with future technology. Transhumanism is centrally about making the human condition better, not sidegrades like becoming the other sex.

Changing from a sex to another per se may not be the sort of objective upgrade championed by transhumanism, but changing from "constrained by your biology at birth" to "able to modify your biology as you see fit" definitely is -- a central part of transhumanism, even.

This has little to do with transhumanism except insofar as both involve altering your body with future technology. Transhumanism is centrally about making the human condition better, not sidegrades like becoming the other sex.

This rings rather hollow when both opponents and supporters of the transgender movement see the link to transhumanism. This is where I bemoan that so much of my information intake being hours upon hours of non-CTRL+Fable podcasts, but there was even some manifesto written in the 90's explicitly advocating for promoting transhumanism by way of transgenderism.

Also, I thought transhumanism is centrally about transcending the limits imposed on us by nature. By the logic of utilitarianism any change you make will be "improving your condition" because you wouldn't have done it otherwise.

This rings rather hollow when both opponents and supporters of the transgender movement see the link to transhumanism.

People say a lot of things. There are people who will assure you that transgender ideology is either the culmination or feminism or incompatible with it. Spend any time reading SJW or transgender communities talk about fiction and you'll find them headcanoning tons of random stuff as actually about transgenderism. But if you read either prominent historical transhumanists or modern prominent transhumanists like Nick Bostrom (co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, now named Humanity+) there is little or no interest in transgenderism, except incidentally insofar as transhumanist technology might make body modification in general much easier.

By the logic of utilitarianism any change you make will be "improving your condition" because you wouldn't have done it otherwise.

I think that's more an economic/libertarian principle (rational choice theory?) rather than the logic of utilitarianism, utilitarianism doesn't say anything about whether people make good choices. Whichever principle says that because people are close to the consequences of their own choices and are self-interested they make better decisions for themselves than distant decision-makers like the government. But yes, providing more choices is generally an upgrade in the sense that it allows people to choose the better option, at least if the choice is easily reversible and provides rapid and clear feedback. ("Becoming a meth addict" is a choice enabled by modern technology, but having that option available is generally not an upgrade. Similarly grocery stores are much better than government meals when it comes to things like choosing food you like, but still struggle at tasks like increasing long-term health.) But the upgrade provided by having sidegrade choices available is much smaller than the upgrade provided by having the choice to continue living, or by granting objective capabilities such as higher intelligence, so it is those that transhumanists focus on.

Yes, I didn't touch on intelligence, cognitive enhancements but that seems a logical consequence. I would argue that there's some connection between the mindset of your stricter definition and my broader outlook, though I accept it may not be the target of current thinking. They share some of the same features as a cognitive displacement, and have the same problem of finite transcenders. If it were to happen, then what? How to other perennial problems disappear when a threshold of technology makes something possible, how does this solve energy problems, global warming? Is it just luxury, lifestyle practices akin to luxury beliefs?

How to other perennial problems disappear when a threshold of technology makes something possible, how does this solve energy problems, global warming? Is it just luxury, lifestyle practices akin to luxury beliefs?

Global warming isn't a 'real' problem. It's a grift by climatologists, aiding a bigger grift by money that seeks to use the hammer of environmental laws to get even more money. There's no risk of people dying out or giant environmental catastrophes. Whatever changes may occur absolutely pale in comparison with e.g. ice ages and such. In fact, we're overdue an ice age, it'd be rather funny if we eventually found out we must do some warming to prevent a new one.

And yes, most problems would disappear if people were smarter. Nuclear power, for example, could get us 100x of our current energy production at zero carbon use. And if the median IQ was 150, running all those reactors wouldn't really be a problem.

Now I think space frontiers should be explored, but we do run up against some pretty hard problems here.

Understatement of the millennium.

People will say “humanity needs to become an interplanetary civilization to avoid extinction”, even though Mars…

  • Has far less gravity
  • A thin, inhospitable atmosphere, with no plausible way to make it thicker
  • No magnetosphere
  • An unknown amount of geothermal energy, but presumably far less than Earth, and you'd have to drill way deeper to get at it
  • 44% less available solar energy than Earth, and that's the best case scenario, as what's atmosphere it as kicks up horrifying black-out dust storms for major portions of the year

The idea Mars would be some outpost of a catastrophe on Earth is farcical. We could fuck up the ecosystem good and proper, and at least Earth would still have gravity and a magnetic shield—we have absolutely no ability to create a sustainable biosphere on Mars.

While I don't think Mars is good for anything long term except for raw material for a Dyson Swarm, you can quite easily create an artificial magnetosphere:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094576521005099

Or

https://medium.com/our-space/an-artificial-martian-magnetosphere-fd3803ea600c

And fusion, let alone fission, makes the lack of solar power more of a nuisance than anything else. We can't rely on it anyway, at least in the further parts of the Solar System.

Re: energy, I've become fond of interorbital kinetic exchanges, partly because they make the otherwise stupidly costly outer planets potentially profitable, but also because you're basically taking natural flywheels and converting them into power / propulsion / etc. Is it still hydroelectric if the water is contained in Uranian plastic dropped from an altitude of 20AU?

Luna tends to get treated as the stepping stone, and Mars the destination, but it seems more likely that Luna becomes a major center for industry/population, and Mars is the stepping stone to the rest of the system. At least Luna is close enough for a meaningful relationship with Earth.

If I may digress briefly, latest models of the history of the Solar System seem to find a significant role for most planets in the backstory to habitable Earth. The complex dance of the giants shaped the inner system in detail, and Venus dropped Theia onto the Earth to create the Moon. Conspicuously missing from all this, though, is Mercury, which also conspicuously is often relegated to an enormous materials depot in speculations on futurism. Now, the anthropic principal doesn't require that everything we see be an important aspect of our prolonged ability to see it, but if there were a simpler way, it would seem more likely that we'd be in that simpler system, so I can't but wonder at the anthropic implications of Solar System architecture that we've yet to discover.

No magnetosphere

Oh boy, you hit a pet peeve of mine.

There are plenty of nigh-insurmountable obstacles to terraforming Mars, but the lack of a magnetic field is really not one of them. Solar wind needed hundreds of millions of years to erode Mars' atmosphere to its current levels, you might as well say the Suez Canal was a waste of resources because plate tectonics will close the Straits of Gibraltar and dry up the Mediterranean 600 thousand years in the future.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats