Well, the site got dumped. I have a bad habit of hoarding tabs, and I've got two pages worth of posts still open, so I'm going to copy-paste them here in raw text so people can salvage what they can. Anyone else who still has pages open, feel free to join in.
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2/12 thread from roughly 2/12 6am EST to 2/13 5:30pm EST. Reference time (ie what the timestamps are relative to) is 5:30pm EST on 2/13. Seems each comment is separated by two blank bullet points. Nesting is obviously broken, and comments that were nested too deep to see without clicking "more comments" are unfortunately absent.
coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1hr ago
new“He Gets Us” doesn’t get it The Christian advertising campaign “He Gets Us” aired two ads during the Super Bowl. The first ad asks “who is my neighbor?” interspersed with shots of mostly unsavory characters. The one you don’t value and welcome, the ad answers, to the drums of glitch-y hip hop. The second ad is titled “Foot Washing” and proved quite controversial. Among the scenes of foot washing depicted in the ad, the following have generated the most discussion: a Mexican police officer washing the feet of a black man wearing gold chains in an alley; a “preppy” normie-coded girl washing the feet of an alt girl; a cowboy washing the feet of aNative American; a woman washing the feet of a girl seeking an abortion (with pro-life activists sidelined, their signs upside down); an oil worker washing the feet of an environmental activist; a woman washing the feet of an illegal migrant; a Christian woman washing the feet of a Muslim; and a priest washing the feet of a sassy gay man. This last ad has tenfold the views on YouTube, in large part due to the negative response by Christians and conservatives, for example Matt Walsh and Babylon Bee editor Joel Berry. Joel writes, There’s a reason the “He Gets Us” commercial didn’t show a liberal washing the feet of someone in a MAGA hat, or a BLM protestor washing an officer’s feet. That would’ve been actually subversive. Because they were strictly following oppressed v oppressor intersectionality guidelines. I mostly agree with Joel. I think that this ad campaign is a failure. The campaign fails to understand what brings people to a religion, or any social movement for that matter, or even any product, and as such it will not lead viewers to join their evangelical church or behave in the intended Christian manner. The audience of the Super Bowl is jointly comprised of people who care about what’s popular and cool, and people who care about remarkable feats of strength and dominance. These people are not going to be compelled to “love” their crack addict neighbor because you tell them to, because why would they listen to you? — there is no deeper motivation substantiated as for why they should do this. In the Gospel, Jesus doesn’t say “love your neighbor because it’s nice to do that and I am guilting you”, he says “love your neighbor so as to be a son of God whom created you, and obtain His reward, or else risk judgment from the eternal judge.” This is reward-driven and status-seeking behavior, the reward being administered by God and the status being administered by the church body. In its context, it requires a belief that the person saying it is the ultimate judge of both life and afterlife. (To behave Christlike, the required motivation is the totalizing significance of Christ... hence the name of the religion.) The starting point of the faith is the most dominant and powerful person telling you to care for the poor, not some cheeky “you should care about the poor because you should.” Again, the Super Bowl viewer cares about what is popular and what is dominant. That’s normal, I’m not criticizing it. So could you not pull anything out of the religious tradition to depict the popularity and dominance of God? What, you feel bad playing off of FOMO to get people to your church? Jesus did just that on many occasions. 1, 2, 3, 4. Do you somehow feel guilty describing Jesus as glorious and powerful? What about the 72,000 angels he commands? You don’t want to tell the viewer that their prayers will be answered, when every 10 minutes there’s an ad for betting and gambling? Viva Las Vegas, non Vita Christi. So it has to be asked, what exactly is the purpose of the campaign? How is this getting people to your church, or even just getting people to behave better? “Jesus gets me” because… biker smoker and crack addict? If the object of the ad is to instill a sense of pity to compel the viewer to behave morally, then there’s clearly better ads to be made. Why not the focal point of the religion, the “innocent beautiful sacrificial lamb slain for our freedom” motif? The religion already comes with a built-in way to empower pity. You could say, “he gets us because he dealt with all our pain and temptation”, and that would make much more sense, while incentivizing the intended result of the ad. As is, I get the idea that the ad campaigners are afraid of any depiction of the life of Christ. I don’t get the sense that these people believe he is an essential ingredient in the moral life. And it’s fine if they don’t, that’s their business, but then dont make multimillion dollars ads about it. If Christ is indeed essential, then your multimillion dollar ad campaign ought to be directed toward producing an image of Christ that is alluring, whether this be through scenes of pity or scenes of power. In an attempt to make Christianity subversive you should not be subverting Christianity. Back to Joel’s critique of the ad: yes, the foot washing ad is problematic. Beside the fact that it is misinterpreted (explained below), it only works to further demean the image of Christianity to an irreligious America. “If I become a Christian, I’ll have to wash an old man’s feet?” The only viewers that will be compelled here are the foot fetish enthusiasts piqued by the alt girl. You are not going to convince anyone to join your social movement by promising them the opportunity to wash a man’s feet in an alley. The foot washing ad elevates the status of people whose lifestyle do not conjure images of Christianity, and whose status is already elevated. During a Super Bowl, it’s not subversive to elevate the status of a vaguely athletic black man wearing gold chains. The half time show was Usher! Neither is it subversive to show an oil rig worker subservient to an environmental activist. In whose world is an environmental activist not more privileged than a dust-coated oil worker? And a wholesome girl washing an alt girl’s feet is not subversive in an event inaugurated by Post Malone’s national anthem. No, no; show me a wealthy and attractive CEO washing the feet of his fat ugly employee, if you must. But don’t just reinstitute the high/low status dynamic already in place by the world. My last criticism I’ll try to keep short: the theological ground of these ads is spurious. There is indeed a scene where Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, but the writer goes out of his way to clarify the meaning behind it. It begins by mentioning that Jesus “loved his own who were in the world”, namely his followers present and future. The students are shocked when their superior attempts to perform this subservient act, until it is explained to be necessary. “If your Lord washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you should do just as I have done to you. I am not speaking of all of you [not Judas]; I know whom I have chosen.” So, rather than being an act that a Christian is compelled to do to anyone, we have an act that Christians do to one another, to cultivate humility and esteem for their brethren. They are told not to do it to merely self-labeled Christians, like Judas, let alone those of other faiths, as the ad suggests they do. Foot washing was a culture-specific action that reflected the status hierarchy in a way that has no direct American parallel. An approximate American parallel would be for a boss to allow his employer to use his office, or for a boss to cook his employee’s family a dinner, or to clean his employee’s keyboard. The difficulty in understanding the event without careful study is the reason why it’s a mistake to depict it as a means of propagating your worldview. Nothing is accomplished. File this under “Christianity continues to die, but not before demeaning itself.” • •2rafa coffee_enjoyer 8m ago
newThere are a lot of denials about this kind of thing, but in my adult PMC life I’ve actually known a moderately large number of very progressive liberal Christians who go to Hillsong or some other happy clappy multiracial Christian pop megachurch thing and basically believe in all of this stuff. I’m not saying it’s the majority but it seems to be less dead than some people here make it out to be. • •reactionary_peasant coffee_enjoyer 34m ago
newGreat post. I was also bemused by the ad. C.S. Lewis had a passage (maybe from God in the Dock, can't find it) about how each age blows one virtue out of proportion and by doing so turns it into a vice, and in our present age this vicious virtue is clearly Charity. This example is yet another example of Christians extending the principal of charity to an absurd scope and at the expense of other virtues (see also immigration and some overseas poverty reduction). The first question that popped into my head after watching was -- cui bono? To me, the ad reeked of this. So I tried to look up who was behind it. Apparently it's a nonprofit called [The Signatry](. Clicking through their site, I don't see any telltale signs of wokeness or progressivism. The entire board is old white dudes, every employee in the random sample I took was white and I only came across one woman. Skimming their site revealed that they created a mural of "Jesus and the children" in Oklahoma City and that they donate to what sound like bog-standard Christian charity causes. There are even negative articles about them about how they're anti-gay. One of their major public donors is Hobby Lobby CEO David Green of supreme court case fame. I'm not really sure what's going on here. A rogue department? Entryism? Or am I merely ignorant enough not to know that most Evangelicals look favorably upon washing the feet of Muslims and unrepentant gays? • •Gaashk coffee_enjoyer 40m ago
newThis has the aesthetics of my aging neighborhood church. I tried going a couple of times, and they were singing about their friends in the 90s dying of AIDS, and almost the only conversation I had afterwards was a church musician mentioning his non-binary daughter. He seemed kind of sad about it, but like he thought he shouldn't be. The steel man is probably that, despite massive amounts of propaganda lately, many people (most? It's hard to know) are being fake about accepting that, and do not actually like effeminate gays, illegal immigrants, underclass blacks, homeless druggies, (their father in law?), and so on. Perhaps a bit more propaganda, this time with a Christian flavor, will push them over into being sincere? Which seems naive? If an attitude has been resistant to decades of extant propaganda, what is this short ad going to do? It's probably an "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" situation for people with media representation skills. • •4doorsmorewhores coffee_enjoyer 44m ago
newThe most prolific American example of footwashing that comes to mind being Mr Rogers washing the feet of some black police officer on Mr Rogers neighbourhood seems to go against a large part of your post re: 1. Hierarchies 2. Familiarity with the concept of foot washing The Pope also does this sometimes and it's in the news. It seems sort of conceited and contemptuous to assume that normies who aren't as obviously well-versed in history as you will see foot-washing and think "Wtf? Christianity is about washing old people's feet? no thank you." What reason do you have to believe that a smaller portion of viewers would "get it" vs what the ad-makers expect? • •ymeskhout 5hr ago · Edited 55m ago How The Bailey Podcast Sausage Gets Made The Bailey is the podcast I started as the semi-official companion of the Motte, and it doesn't have the most consistent release schedule. I know. Stop reminding me. Go listen to the last episode though, it's really great, and Shakesneer should be again commended for participating. I want to peel back the curtain a bit and outline some practices I've adopted that I'm surprised to hear are not all that widespread. I've previously written about the immense benefits of real-time adversarial conversations that are not easily replicated within the written medium. I never claimed that it's superior by every metric however, and one major failure point for live debates is how they're much more susceptible to the Gish gallop maneuver. This is the tactic where someone drowns out a debate by offering so many low-quality arguments that they make up for their lack of quality through sheer quantity. This is a serious enough problem that Sam Harris has cited it as a major reason he avoids debating certain topics (namely the topic of vaccination). The solution is extremely simple: require advance notice for all citations. Before every episode of the Bailey, every participant is asked to share links and sources that they think are useful or are planning to rely upon. This helps everyone have the same foundation before we hit record and lets us skip a lot of unnecessary exposition, but it also mitigates against someone appearing to win an argument but only through the element of surprise. Sharing sources ahead of time also helps to avoid the commonly tedious "the studies I'm citing are better than your studies" epistemic impasse. Advance notice takes a page from the legal profession, where evidence cannot be introduced at trial unless the other side has been notified, and a strict podcasting implementation would impose similar prohibitions for every participant. When David Pakman interviewed Jacob Chansley (aka QAnon Shaman) one of the ways the discussion kept going off the rails is that Chansley would respond with a torrential rain of purportedly supporting allegations (what Pakman described as "setting small fires conundrum"). When asked about QAnon theories, Chansley said: ...if you look into Jeffrey Epstein and what he was doing. If you look into the Finders, if you look into the Franklin cover-up, if you look into the testimony of Ronald Bernard, if you look into the Barney Frank scandal, if you look into the Michael Aquino military-based scandals. If you look into the numerous scandals coming out now regarding all these people that debunked Pizzagate and now they're being arrested and charged with child porn charges and child abuse charges, then it's quite clear that there is some sort of an elite sex trafficking pedophilia ring in DC and Hollywood. And he went on like this. Unless you've already been marinating within this sphere and are already familiar with these claims, it's impossible to substantively respond to any of them in the moment. Each individual allegation will require significant radio dead air just to get your bearings about who is involved and what they're accused of, followed by several hours/days/weeks to properly investigate. The entire purpose of an advance notice rule has always been to avoid 'trial by ambush' and it's odd why this expectation is not more widely adopted. The second practice is paired along a trust expectation. I'm the one who ultimately edits and decides what the final cut will be, but I edit with a light touch primarily to get rid of ums, silences, or (rarely) dead-end discussions that don't go anywhere. There has been a long history of media outlets engaging in misleading editing with the intent of making an ideological opponent look bad (Katie Couric's Under the Gun documentary added an eight-second pause to make a gun-rights advocate appear as if he was speechless in response to a question), and the obvious way to guard against this is to always have your own recording when interacting with any journalist. I've adopted the same practice and have always provided every participant with full access to the raw audio files, and even ensured they have a chance to listen to the final cut before it's posted publicly. Sometimes we've re-recorded or added passages, and I allow some leeway if anyone wants to take back something they've inadvertently blurted out (generally falls under the umbrella of accidental doxing details). No one thus far has asked for this, but I wouldn't allow a revision that is meant to cover a weakness in one's argument. Thirdly, I try to engage in some fact-checking though I can't claim to be comprehensive. If someone makes a factual claim that I find dubious (either on the air or during editing) I ask for a citation, and I delete the segment if they can't provide one. An example of this process is from our An Unhinged Conversation on Policing episode where I tried to fact-check some assertions about national testosterone comparisons. Doing this in real-time is more challenging but still feasible, and if a jury-rigged zero-income enterprise like the Bailey can do this, runaway successes like The Joe Rogan Experience and their largesse can easily implement something more than just Jamie and his perfunctory Googling. If I had more resources and a steady roster of guests, I'd have one or two paid fact-checkers whose sole job is to interject when they sniff out some bullshit. I look down on podcasts that do nothing on this front, and it's particularly inexcusable when they can afford way more. And lastly, I've also accommodated requests to mask or modify voices. The easiest way is to pitch shift or fuck with the equalizer. The more elaborate and superior method is to hire a voice actor to redub the whole track, which we did for the Multi Ethnic Casting episode by replacing Ishmael with a thematically-appropriate Nigerian woman. That cost only $120 back then, and AI advances have already made this basically free. Admittedly, all this adds more work for me but I find it worthwhile to have some standards. I'm always open to having more civil conversations about contentious culture war topics, so don't hesitate to reach out ymeskhout[a]gmail.com if you have a topic in mind. • •
Glassnoser ymeskhout 1hr ago · Edited 1hr ago
newYour email link doesn't work. This is interesting information. I was confused about why it sometimes sounded like you were picking up from a previous discussion about the topic. Now, I know it's because of the shared references. • •ymeskhout Glassnoser 54m ago
newThanks, Markdown drives me insane sometimes. And it's interesting hearing how the conversations sound from your perspective, having a shared foundation always seemed like a natural way to have a good discussion. • •Being ymeskhout 3hr ago I look down on podcasts that do nothing on this front, and it's particularly inexcusable when they can afford way more. I think this is the core of it and your claim is actually too narrow. Your podcast is tiny and low budget (no offense), yet you manage to take all of these precautions. Coming up with these precautions wasn't some groundbreaking discovery; it didn't take years, countless academics, or a multitude of thinktanks to develop. Which leaves the big question of if you can do it, why can't/doesn't anyone else? And this isn't just podcasts: radio can and should implement these rules as should journalism as should politicians (during senate hearings at least) as should public debates..... I can see only two options: 1. Either they are all grossly incompetent (unlikely). 2. Their goals are not your goals. They are optimizing their discussions for something other than intellectual discovery (less charitably: truth). The extent to which we judge a podcast or other forum for this shortcoming should depend on how they position themselves. Joe Rogan, for example, I don't think deserves much criticism (at least relative to others). He is a meathead who is clearly optimizing for topics he is interested in rather than the truth. If seeing him spend thousands of hours talking about the looniest conspiracy theories and admitting every time that he just thinks they are fun (and not necessarily true) doesn't convince a listener that his primary goal isn't truth, I don't know what would. Likewise, I think his lack of accuracy is less worth of disdain because I think he is less capable (I understand this is a dangerous argument, but I will make it nonetheless). This is a guy with basically no education whose team consists of only one other person: a regular joe whose only skill is being able to Google things and do basic audio "engineering". If anything I'm impressed he manages to have as much intellectual rigor as he does. When you are a major news station with entire teams capable of (and ostensibly dedicated to) researching yet you still manage to regularly underperform Joe Rogan in intellectual rigor, I think it's hard to overstate the level of failure. I suspect most Americans agree and this is why we see the trust in media approaching the lizardman constant (at least with certain demos).
I do think that your description of the gish gallop is incomplete and your solution isn't a great solution as a result. I think a gish gallop is better understood as creating (deliberately or accidentally) an asymmetry of work: throwing a whole bunch of citations at someone takes MUCH less time than reading, evaluating, and developing a critique/counterargument for each of those citations. In the internet era it's never been easier to compile the gallop so we see them being trotted out more and more often. Having citations "pre registered" doesn't really address this asymmetry. A guest can still throw out four hundred citations and his opponent will be overwhelmed trying to dig into each of them even if he is given weeks to prepare. The reason the gish gallop works is because most listener's aren't equipped to understand it correctly - they aren't using the correct Bayesian reasoning. I think this is easiest to explain with an idealized (both debaters are reasonable and participating in good faith) example: • Galloper cites 100 claims. • CounterGalloper says "That's a lot, let's start from the top. Claim 1 is false because a, b, & c." • Let's assume that CounterGalloper is correct AND convincing: the audience agrees that claim 1 is false/irrelevant • Galloper typically responds, "I don't think you're correct in discarding it, BUT EVEN IF YOU ARE the remaining proof is overwhelming" • Most listeners end up very slightly discounting the Galloper, but still think is thinking something like "Sure, the galloper may not be right on every single detail, but most of the evidence (99% !) supports him.
If the listener were using proper Bayesian logic they should instead be thinking something like "Of the claims CounterGalloper addressed, so far 0% have been correct. Therefore, I'll adjust the probability that the remaining 99 claims are correct downwards."
If both debaters are competent the interaction continues: • The CounterGalloper points this out with something like: "If this one claim is false, the others probably are too." • The Galloper (likely correctly) says something like: "You just cherry picked the weakest claim. Even if one or two of my claims are weak, the majority are facts that you can't disprove." • The CounterGalloper may move onto the next claim in the gallop. The Galloper is free to make the same "CherryPicked" argument. We find ourselves trapped in this loop. • In real life, this about when both debaters and the audience become exhausted and the debate is no longer productive.
I hope this, perhaps contrived, example shows the problem and the solution: you need to shift the burden of narrowing down which claims should be evaluated from the CounterGalloper to the Galloper. If you leave that choice on the CounterGalloper, the Galloper will always be able to retreat to the "just cherry picked" defense. I believe a good way to accomplish this is to do what you are doing with preregistering evidence but demanding that the participant choose for himself which evidence of his is the most compelling. In reality, a galloper will likely still try to gallop if he finds his supposed best evidence collapsing. In this event, the host/moderator should remind the participants and audience that these claims were the ones the Galloper himself found most compelling. • •
OracleOutlook Fiat justitia ruat caelum Being 1hr ago
newThe CounterGalloper should ask something like, "What do you think is your strongest claim?" and then target that. • •ymeskhout Being 1hr ago
newYour podcast is tiny and low budget (no offense), yet you manage to take all of these precautions. Oh no offense at all taken, that was kind of my point. I wouldn't try to hold JRE to any standard if he didn't put up a thin veneer of verification with Jamie-pull-it-up. If I had to guess why more rigorous fact-checking isn't more prevalent overall, I'm guessing one under-appreciated component is that many within the media ecosystem are fixated on not jeopardizing the networking relationships they rely on. If you earn a reputation as a hardball interviewer, you'll end up with fewer people willing to do interviews with you (I don't know how Isaac Chotiner manages to convince people to talk to him). There used to be more of a division between 'paid' and 'earned' media coverage in the form of marketing vs PR, but it's near impossible to tell it apart nowadays. Journalism has long had to wrangle with the problems of "access journalism" where critical coverage can get you frozen out. I believe a good way to accomplish this is to do what you are doing with preregistering evidence but demanding that the participant choose for himself which evidence of his is the most compelling. Yes I agree with you completely, so the guidance I described is incomplete. It's just not practical to go over 100 different sources in any reasonable amount of time. I have suggested exactly this for an episode on 2020 election fraud allegations that never got recorded where I ask the other person to pick whatever they think are their three strongest claims, and then we can focus on just that instead of go on a neverending safari. • •ZeroPipeline Being 1hr ago
newThis is handled in a legal context by barring the introduction of cumulative evidence so perhaps a similar solution can be applied here. • •cjet79 ymeskhout 3hr ago I am still interested in doing the Nationalism episode. This is helpful to read ahead of time. I'm not sure I plan on submitting anything as a citation. I have in person conversations occasionally, and generally feel like I have lost them when I have to start citing stuff. General knowledge of history and current news feels like it should be sufficient for most topics. • •
ymeskhout cjet79 1hr ago
newI don't want to give the wrong impression, almost every source we rely upon tends to be be mentioned in the show notes and you can see that it's usually a dozen at most. Most of the time it's background reading material that gets everyone up to speed. Advance notice of citations are generally only useful if someone is about to make a contentious factual claim. • •some ymeskhout 3hr ago The solution is extremely simple: require advance notice for all citations. Moving away from the allegedly superior oral-only debate towards one which requires the written word is a big admission of the harms of the position advocated in one of your previous top level posts. True rigour, substanstive argument requires background, works of others, which would be to slow to explain to another by speech. I could tell you to google the key words I hope will give you the page I am citing, but that is unreliable. I could tell the URL but that could take minutes, and is prone mistakes. But even if eliminate problems with giving cites by mouth, your demand (which I find justified, and support) that they be given before the actual debate, means that the principle of live debate is weakened. It is turned to one in which the can not just tune in and see the argument being demolished, she needs to also read the texts upon which the debaters will be relying. but it also mitigates against someone appearing to win an argument but only through the element of surprise. But that is one of purported benefits you touted in your past post. Sprining up an unexpected line of reasoning onto a person allows you to hang a person with their own words, but sometimes it is easier to make the argument, than to refute it. Bullshit Asymmetry Principle attests to this. And he went on like this. Unless you've already been marinating within this sphere and are already familiar with these claims, it's impossible to substantively respond to any of them in the moment. Which also a problem with the "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be." rule. Both are subjective. Because you are exposed to arguments appearing to increase the likelyhood of "Trump did J6" being true, you wouldn't demand cites for them. Likewise the mods, if they are trapped in English speaking bubble, are more likely to be unfamiliar with claims which are common knowledge among people whose native language is another. Discourse is permitted with less effort, if one makes stays within the overton window of 21st century US. But if one steps outside it, a burden of citation is placed on them. Which wouldn't as a problem, if what determines the arguments and statements of fact with which the people are acquainted with, would be sufficiently diverse and not subject to partisan interference. But this isn't the case. • •
ymeskhout some 57m ago
newMy cross-examination post frequently gets misunderstood as me saying that oral-only debate is superior to writing but I didn't claim that. My argument was how some elements of one medium are superior and cannot be easily replicated within the other medium, and that applies in both directions. When I decry the element of surprise here it isn't based on springing an unexpected line of reasoning (which I think is generally fair game) but rather unveiling evidence that would have otherwise fallen apart if there was enough time for scrutiny. • •gattsuru 16hr ago · Edited 2hr ago Mediated group hallucinations and consensus reality There's a joking-not-joking post, a while back, from JonSt0kes. At the risk of pulling the setup apart from the punchline, the setup is what I'd like to highlight. Me: I refused to turn on my AR glasses & see the barista as an anime fox otherkin spirit. Her glasses flagged that my filters were off. It's a bit of surrealism, and probably intended as foil to comment on more immediate political conflicts outside of the scope of this discussion. There's certainly people who'd love augmented reality avatars, and while none would want to force them on others, well, tomorrow is another day. It's not even really possible right now. VTubers are a small genre focused on presenting a virtual avatar to their viewers, sometimes in surprising genres, but they generally depend on carefully calibrated cameras and nearly-ideal lighting conditions to correctly recognize precise pose details. Body tracking (and even estimation) works, sometimes, for incredibly controlled environments. Even the best augmented reality systems are too bulky and have too short a battery life to be worn around all day, or even for long parts of a day. And heaven help anyone who wants to implement a standardized communication protocol that works between different headset vendors without a ton of unreliable jank. Some of these technical limitations might not be solvable, period: modern tech has done amazing things with microlenses, but optics are a cruel mistress. There's spaces where these technical limitations don't exist, or can be maneuvered around. Hence the many references above to tech driven by virtual reality gaming, primarily but not solely chatrooms like VRChat. You can control lighting, and have multiple calibrated cameras at set distances and angles, and have everyone in a room wearing multiple inertial measurement units all speaking the same language. There is little background noise that makes audio transcription and voice manipulation jank in the real world. Far fewer chances for reality to break the illusion, excepting when you find furniture the hard way. In those environments, it's not only common to define how you and others are presented, and where. It's often unavoidable. In VRChat specifically, some clients ("Questies" and more recently cell phone users, as opposed to those using full-blown computers with connected VR displays) can't see more complicated avatars or even enter some environments, if they use too many resources to be practically implemented on their headsets. Individual users also have a complex system of less direct control through a privileged user system, as well as more traditional block/mute capabilities. And that, if anything, is the low end: VR environments tend to think of a person's self-presentation as sacrosanct, and as a result, it's much harder to make someone into something they aren't than to hide them. That's just not some fundamental part of technology. As a comparison, Final Fantasy XIV is an (acclaimed) MMORPG. Like many MMOs, it officially prohibits third-party modifications. Like many MMO mods, they still exist, and unless you're cheating on a world first race or being incredibly obvious about it, there's not really a lot that the game-runners want to do. There's actually some fascinating technical work being done here; where earlier tools swapped references to asset locations on disk while the client is closed, modern tools can dynamically reload or redraw on arbitrary triggers at arbitrary times, and there's even a tool for synchronizing between users in certain configurations, even transferring mods from one user to another (with accompanying security concerns). This can quickly get bizarrely recursive: there are now mods that exist solely for the purpose of overwriting other people's vanilla glamours. Some of this goes exactly the direction anyone who's seen Skyrim modding would expect, and there's no small amount of comically oversized dick and/or boob mods, sometimes even for different genders. Some of it's more subtle modifications down that path, as the default models are about as featured as a ken doll even above the hips, or to smooth things out when desired.. Sometimes it's weirder than you would expect [bonus for those willing to log into the site (cw: no genitals or female nipples, possible spoilers? SAN damage for those familiar with those spoilers?)]. But a good portion of it's far more expressive. Tired of Dark Knight being Shadow The Edgehog? Swap to Devil May Cry, floral, or light-themed. Instead of naruto-running as a Ninja, you can practice your gun-kata. A lot of design-space exists and revolves around fluffy tails, goofy dances, capes, bizarre accessories, even posture. And then there's pages after pages of hairstyles, or mods that just turning on hats. Want to get rid of Lalafel or replace every PC with their alternate universe Roe version? There's a tool for it! Yet it results in a world that's not just distinct from the what the developers designed, or what some unaffiliated observer might see, but where multiple people in the same room might have wildly different worlds that they're interacting with, even when sharing some mods. And there's some easy objections, here. Sex is the easiest. Someone running male nudity mods in FFXIV will find out the hard way (hurr hurr) that several comedic quest chains normally involve a very animated older gentleman running around in his smallclothes, who is now Very Happy to see you; someone aggressively doing so can change every single player and (humanoid, non-special model) NPC into their desired gender and species. And, of course, someone who wants to do something intentionally has far broader space available. There's no small number of other ways to embarrass people, of course. If you think a three-foot dong would be a little beneath your standards, there's some political statements that could have far more impact. And that's at the low end of the discussion space, and going into video games is the lower risk environment. Trace has spoken about someone beaten as a nazi in part due to time spent with a (stupid) Garry's Mod avatar. It's easier to think of things that offend Blue Tribe sensibilities that can play that role, over Red Ones, but it's not actually that hard to come up with Red Tribe or more general offenses. As ironic as "don't misgender me" will be when it's some social conservative getting involuntarily catgirl'd, I'm not sure what'll happen if thirty people start passing around screenshots or video of a well-known person's character marching like a member of the SS, but we're probably going to find out eventually. And you don't have to be Neal Stephenson or Cory Doctorow to come up with heavy-handed approaches that these technologies could use. From the other direction, this (cw: censored 'female' nudity) particular description of events could genuinely reflect someone with neither correct boundaries nor behaviors, and maybe that's more likely than not -- minors getting into adults-only spaces, and adults not acting responsibly in unsecured or insufficiently age-gated areas, have been genuine problems on the internet since usenet. But it could also have happened if the interviewer running default settings was the only person in the room seeing everyone there. Of course, VR(/AR/XR/spatial computing) is doomed. MMORPGs are funny, but they aren't going to change society, and game mods, no matter how technically impressive, are even less likely to do so. Beyond that, there is an argument, and not an entirely wrong one, that these environments are 'fake' in some philosophically important way. People (mostly) exist playing VRChat, but they don't actually live in VRChat. FFXIV has a single source of truth on its servers, but they're probably stored as a mess of position information and arbitrary numeric values, and definitely not some litrpg virtual world. Even if this expands to other purely-digital or even digitally-augmented fields, why should you care if someone does the 2028-equivalent of a lazy photoshop? This isn't even as life-like as deepfakes, or as humiliating as a really dedicated adversary could go -- the possibility someone on the other end of a conference might be putting your camera feed on top of some nudes would be offputting, but the risk of someone Toobining it has predated modern telephony. Who cares? Block these sites in your uBlock Origin so you won't see that shit in your searches. If you want others to have a clean internet, feel free to share this post! I maintain four main blocklists for the Fediverse. A browser addon that highlights transphobic and trans-friendly social network pages and users with different colors. Thus, the Trump Filter is presented as part of the antidote for this toxic candidacy. This Chrome extension will identify parts of a web page likely to contain Donald Trump and erase them from the Internet. Download this extension to simplify your BDS commitments. PalestinePact automatically scans products on all major websites and blurs them if they are linked to the BDS list. and By refusing to exit the Russian market and continuing to pay their taxes there, some companies are implicitly supporting the war in Ukraine. This extension identifies their products while shopping online so you can boycott their products. And, perhaps worse: i love the new feature of phones where they figure out what you’re trying to take a photo of and then hallucinate it for you There's an old joke, by modern standards, about how once one could be certain that the man in a corner of a subway angrily shouting into the air at a person who wasn't there was a schizophrenic, until cell phones and bluetooth meant that could just be a businessman talking to someone you couldn't see. What happens when ten million people see something you don't? Can't? To cut to the chase, quite a lot of things that you care about either aren't real (do you think your bank account is a bunch of coins in a safe?) or hasn't reflected the real thing, already. There are already tools, some of which you should already be using (get uBlock!) to filter what you see, in your normal usage of the web. An increasing and surprising amount of your world will be passing through these sort of mediators, unless you put increasing efforts into avoiding it. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this! The hallucinating cameras are just trying to get the picture you wanted to take. Blocking results you were never going to check in Google Searches can be one of the few ways to avoid the Dread Pinterest. There's a block function on this site, after all. I try to avoid blocking as a matter of principle, but there are definitely ways that has hurt, rather than helped, my ability to seriously engage with both reality and some political perspectives; it's not something I would recommend for everyone or even most people. And there are defiiiiiiinitely people and tags even I block aggressively in, say, the context of a certain furry booru. The bare concept is not even new. Filter bubble was popularized as a term in 2010, with Eli Pariser writing a book on it. BlockBots date back to 2015, if not earlier, and filter lists to the usenet era. From the other political valience, progressive views on talk radio or Fox News as a conservative bubble aren't entirely right, but there certainly are a lot of people who even then only listened to (and later, watched) what they wanted to hear. But I think we're going to see things no one thought anyone would want to implement in 1997, or 2010, driven by forces far more varied and far more subtle than anyone expected. St0kes mostly highlights the filter bubble from the context of politics, even if he sees, rarely, where it breaks against him. Eli Pariser considered algorithmic (and business drives) toward the separation of filter bubbles. There's no shortage of modern-day writers discussing AI, and a Dead Internet where people find it easier to talk with carefully-tuned ChatGPT instance rather than fight increasingly-useless Google is definitely a possibility. I think they all overlook the power of human meat and spite. As far as I know, there is no tool that will filter your Google Map search results by the political donations and rumors thereof. Yet. There is no flight planning website that drops flights where layover or transfer involve states with undesirable gun or gender politics. Yet. I don't know of a crowdsourced tool to check your phone contacts and Facebook friends for (alleged) criminals or bad actors or meanies. Yet. There's no way to crosscheck a dating profile against social media phrenology. Yet. No off-the-shelf tools to use Nextdoor to hide the neighbor with the yappy dog from my phone or doorbell. Yet. No headphones that noise cancel people you don't want to hear from. Yet. And a thousand, thousand other things that could be possible, as we invite others have more and more influence on how we see the world in the most literal sense, and make it harder and harder to avoid doing so. "What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?"—so asketh the last man and blinketh... "We have discovered happiness"—say the last men, and blink thereby. They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one's neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth. Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbleth over stones or men! ... No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wanteth the same; every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse. "Formerly all the world was insane,"—say the subtlest of them, and blink thereby. They are clever and know all that hath happened: so there is no end to their raillery. People still fall out, but are soon reconciled—otherwise it spoileth their stomachs. "We have discovered happiness,"—say the last men, and blinketh • •
drmanhattan16 gattsuru 6hr ago An interesting topic for sure, I think one of the myriad Chesterton quotes I've seen thrown around in this space says people from adversity/seeing something new, or something along those lines. Human history is rife with people talking about how new experiences can fundamentally alter how we see things, perhaps even sending us on wild adventures. Segregating oneself from those experiences as a cosmopolitan observer instead of a traveler in a new land can prevent learning and change. Have you see this old Tom Scott video? He goes into this same idea, about how we might one day live in a world where multiple societies could co-inhabit the same spaces but never interact because they literally can't see each other due to chips in the brain. It terrifies my mind for the reasons above, where people may never learn how to appropriately deal with the shock and anger that comes with realizing "immoral" people walk past you as if it's their land, not yours. At the same time, there's a TracingWoodgrains post about how valuable it can be to let a community define itself for those within it. He was talking about race, but it seems to be a universally valuable trait in that no one would like the idea that before they can even construct a defense against it, the world has already implanted an image of who they are in their own mind. • •
gattsuru drmanhattan16 2hr ago · Edited 2hr ago Human history is rife with people talking about how new experiences can fundamentally alter how we see things, perhaps even sending us on wild adventures. Segregating oneself from those experiences as a cosmopolitan observer instead of a traveler in a new land can prevent learning and change. Yeah, my objection here is definitely along these lines, rather than mere principle or aestheticism or even fear about this. There's reason I've got "They're paving over the wrinkles so you can't think!" on my draft list. Have you see this old Tom Scott video? I hadn't seen that, but it's definitely an interesting (and funny!) piece. It tunnel-visions a bit from being so comedy-focused on setting up its punchline, to an extent that I'd expect a lot of people reject it for the dependence on tech that doesn't exist and may never be accepted, but the punchline is pretty well-delivered. The other side that I think Scott's joke overlooks the breadth of possible problem space. He mentions friends sharing blocklists organically, and blocking, but in many ways there's a lot of pragmatic reasons that might not be what ends up mattering as much, especially in the next ten or twenty years. You can play a hundred hours with someone in FFXIV with Mare Synchronos, and not know their character's 'real' gender or race. We can share not just blocklists, but criteria for how things get blocked, and crowdsource and bulk ingest ways to fill them. We can list everyone's worst moments and dumbest mistakes, or their proudest successes, right by their heads; turn our opponents into ogres making the dumbest arguments in the most grating voices and our allies into halo'd elves. We can make things perfect. At the same time, there's a TracingWoodgrains post about how valuable it can be to let a community define itself for those within it. He was talking about race, but it seems to be a universally valuable trait in that no one would like the idea that before they can even construct a defense against it, the world has already implanted an image of who they are in their own mind. Perhaps, but I've got pretty badly mixed feelings. I've seen a lot of communities formed before social media tried to eat the world, and a lot of communities try to form afterward. There's reasons the modern day therian communities are the way they are, and maybe they are the end result of twenty years of the crucible going til the dross overflows. But it feels like people tried to replace a crucible with iron bars, and then were proud that now, with a prison around the whole world, they were the only ones free. • •
drmanhattan16 gattsuru 1hr ago
newBut it feels like people tried to replace a crucible with iron bars, and then were proud that now, with a prison around the whole world, they were the only ones free. There's certainly an extreme, ala Tom Scott, where we have sanitized the world to the point of making Paul Kingsnorth have an aneurysm. But there is also some value, I think, in letting people have their...I don't like the term safe space for this, so let's call it a "normalcy space". Where the dominant perception of you and your peers, your community, etc. is defined primarily by you and no one else. You can and arguably should be able to step into a world which doesn't cater to you or anyone in particular, but I don't see anything wrong with being able to sanitize at least some part of the ideological and cultural landscape to be fit for you. • •gattsuru drmanhattan16 just now
newThere's an irony in having this conversation now. I think wanting to sanitize part of the ideological and cultural landscape is understandable, and I wish there was nothing wrong to do so. And it's important for people from outside a community trying to talk in, who want to be taken credibly or honestly, to understand the sort of motivations that make subcultures curl in on themselves. But it's very easy for a community that successfully cuts itself off from the outside world to go wonky. • •WhiningCoil drmanhattan16 6hr ago It terrifies my mind for the reasons above, where people may never learn how to appropriately deal with the shock and anger that comes with realizing "immoral" people walk past you as if it's their land, not yours. They'll learn when people start going missing Well, given the outcome of the scandal... maybe they won't after all. We don't even have AR yet and it's head in the sand all the way. • •
faceh drmanhattan16 6hr ago He goes into this same idea, about how we might one day live in a world where multiple societies could co-inhabit the same spaces but never interact because they literally can't see each other due to chips in the brain. A solution to the housing crisis that involved multiple people 'owning' the same house and being electronically manipulated so they never interfere with or even perceive the others, and all interior decorations being completely virtual so they can enjoy exactly the environment they individually prefer is kinda funny to think about. • •
drmanhattan16 faceh 6hr ago I don't know if you could get to that point. Atoms, after all, can't be tricked by AR, and even in his description, Tom never says you fundamentally couldn't notice another person (sorry, I made that point too strongly). You could bump into someone and you should probably be able to see them regardless of your filter at that point. I actually think I'm there, in a sense, because I don't interact with the Christian community around me despite there being a large church near my house. They might as well be dark matter to me, imperceptible in some way, a presence I acknowledge only intellectually. • •
faceh drmanhattan16 6hr ago · Edited 6hr ago I'm just saying if someone was fully plugged into AR goggles with noise-cancelling headphones and a little brain-stimulation tech to keep you from actually bumping into anyone, in theory you could have like three people occupy the same living space but not be truly 'aware' of each other. I say three people because if you managed it just right, each one could have a different 8 hour shift where only one of them is using the main bed for sleeping at any time and thus minimizing the risks of 'collisions'. A weaker version of this is where everyone only temporarily rents the space they're using for a brief time. You summon a car for transport on an as-needed basis, you rent out a particular bed/bedroom for the evening, you can't be sure if its the same one from the night before. The AR Goggles just impose a consistent view (the car always looks the same in-goggles, the bedroom looks the same, etc. etc.) so you don't notice that you are actually a transient with no permanent belongings. • •
TIRM faceh 3hr ago you are actually a transient with no permanent belongings Some might say you will own nothing and be happy. And if these chips make ground bugs taste like veal, then you'd presumably feel fine eating a tasty dinner in your sleeping pod. • •
faceh TIRM 1hr ago
newThat phrase has been turning over in my head a lot. Would it really be SO BAD if we lived in a social order where personal ownership was a rare exception? Imagine if you could visit any given city on earth and rent a comfortable place to reside in for the duration of your stay. Where you can borrow a car on demand and not have to worry about icky maintenance expenses and fixing it if it breaks. Where you don't have to worry about upgrading your phone every year or so because you just turn it in at the end of your lease period and they issue you a new, state-of-the art upgrade. Where you don't have to move a huge collection of physical media with you because you can access your shows and movies where-ever you are using your streaming accounts. Where swapping jobs is as easy as selecting a geographic area and uploading your resume to find a suitable gig. Being functionally rootless with no personal possessions or dedicated 'home' to return to means you have absolute freedom to move around to where-ever the market takes you. Not so bad a thought? Bad. The entire concept is bad (to me). But if you accept the underlying premise/logic, a world where AR makes you feel like you own things and gives you the psychological assurances that come with personal ownership whilst also having the convenience of having no real possessions other than a bank account associated with your name seems like a no-brainer. • •TIRM faceh 35m ago
newSome rootless young person might like it. But I am very much tied down with my family. I have my yard with my garden next to my house that I worked hard to renovate and my kid sleeps in their room, etc, etc. On one hand this is all just stuff. On the other hand I really like my property and my stuff and I worked hard and paid a lot to set up things my way (or really the way my wife likes it, but close enough). No bug paste in a pod can replace what I have and value. • •faceh gattsuru 8hr ago · Edited 6hr ago Hitting a slight tangent, I've considered that the "killer app" for augmented reality (if we assume a situation where almost everyone is wearing glasses all the time) is allowing attractive females to be extremely selective of who gets to pay them attention and enjoy their good looks. As in, a world where the hottest females will wear the equivalent of burquas everywhere they go, but have the option to select various bystanders who they find attractive and allow those bystanders to download an avatar of their real appearance and see what others are missing out on. Maybe they intentionally appear as a green, knobby-skinned orc creature to the plebs ("jokes on you I'm into that shit") but when a 6' chiseled chad walks by he gets the full view, and also access to her phone number/metaverse ID if he wants. Add a layer of dystopia and maybe other plebs can unlock the real view but only by paying the fee which is prominently displayed in their vision. Really go the extra mile and maybe big data allows the user to dynamically alter that fee depending on who is looking and their apparent ability to pay + their apparent willingness/desperation to look at hot women. In a sense this is a natural evolution of the current state of the web where every piece of content worth seeing is paywalled and microtransactions are everywhere and even basic human interactions becomes more transactional in nature (see for example livestreamers who will only read messages that users directly pay to send them). But I honestly don't think this is the particular version of the future that will come to pass, ONLY that there are probably a LOT of people who would willingly jump into this instantiation of the tech. It solves a particular class of problem for certain people (hot people who only want to interact with other hot people and avoid getting excess attention from plebs) even if it probably creates new problems we haven't even thought of. The advent of AR tech and the apparent aplomb with which some subset of the population are adopting it is my Squidward moment for realizing "holy cow the world really is going to fly off in a weird direction that I am unprepared to deal with." Whatever else it is worth, it really makes me desire to increase my connection with baseline reality rather than weaken those ties. Whether simulation hypothesis is true or not, it seems to me there IS something meaningful about living within the actual constraints of the physical world rather than trying to escape to a world you 'know' to be artificial. Edit: And I think that, perhaps ironically, AR can be used to increase ties to baseline reality when you use it to elicit more true and factual about your local environment. I.e. if you have a display giving you an accurate temperature reading of our immediate area and telling you the composition of the air you're breathing and displaying a live feed of your personal biometrics, you are in a sense becoming more entangled with the matter that composes your immediate surroundings, in much the same way you would be if you had directly augmented your sense of sight or hearing. So I'm not coming at this from a technophobic viewpoint, I think. • •
gattsuru faceh 4hr ago I've considered that the "killer app" for augmented reality (if we assume a situation where almost everyone is wearing glasses all the time) is allowing attractive females to be extremely selective of who gets to pay them attention and enjoy their good looks. I think access to the phone number/metaverse username will drive more than access to 'hotness', at least for women putting themselves out there. There's definitely already spaces in FFXIV that you can go and won't see what's really going on unless you pass some level of (usually text-focused) checks, (and/or, as with The Willow Street link above, put down some cash), but the same people put no small amount of effort into how they'd look for non-synced people -- Glamourer is nearly as critical as Mare Synchronous to this class of users, in many ways, since otherwise you end up wearing BurlapSackv3. Some people do use Discord in a kinda similar or overlapping role. I dunno if there's something similar in the het online dating world. Kinda surprising if there isn't, although I guess the median and mode purchaser on het dating websites isn't a woman, anyway. And I think that, perhaps ironically, AR can be used to increase ties to baseline reality when you use it to elicit more true and factual about your local environment. Yeah, there's a pretty wide variety of spaces there. I've got a few microdisplays I've long been futzing with to try to integrate everything from voice transcription to waypoint and map marking to live translation to sense augmentation on, and I've separately tried replicating this (no luck, but might just be me). This hit my interests for other reasons, but using mini-EEG, eye-tracking, and other sensors to put yourself into the world more completely has a lot of potential. Probably won't get anywhere productive, I'll admit, but it's been something that's driven my attention since at least the first time I saw Ghost in the Shell: SAC. And I'm not really opposed to virtual or 'fake' worlds, in no small part because I don't think the line is quite as clear as people want to draw. That said, while AR/VR/spatial whatever makes a great scifi twist feel, a lot of this filtering capability can happen well outside of it, and I think it is worth recognizing it. Even smart phones fell out of popularity, I don't think we could put the genie back in the bottle now. • •
WhiningCoil faceh 7hr ago Whatever else it is worth, it really makes me desire to increase my connection with baseline reality rather than weaken those ties. Whether simulation hypothesis is true or not, it seems to me there IS something meaningful about living within the actual constraints of the physical world rather than trying to escape to a world you 'know' to be artificial. A part of me wants to believe AR won't ever take off beyond a few Glassholes or whatever the Apple misnomer is going to be. The notion of it going full Black Mirror, where nearly everyone has it implanted directly into their eye with the government having ultimate control of what people are even allowed to see, seems beyond the pale. Then again, it wouldn't be the first Black Mirror episode that came true. All this inspires in me feelings not unlike the fundamentalist Christians who believe having a drivers license or a social security number is the mark of the devil. Probably been 30 years since I last saw a headline about someone like that. Maybe in 30 more years I'll make headlines for ranting and raving about how having a "Z-Eye" is the mark of the devil, and I'm no longer allowed in most businesses or government buildings because of it. • •
faceh WhiningCoil 7hr ago where nearly everyone has it implanted directly into their eye with the government having ultimate control of what people are even allowed to see, seems beyond the pale. We'd be seeing something like that in some of the more aggressive dictatorships around the world before we saw it in the West, I think. Not that it's too much solace. And implementing such a regime would create such intense demand for jailbreaking I doubt it would be sustainable. The Black Mirror episode that seems closest to coming true right now is Nosedive. Combining the concept of an ongoing universal rating system and augmented reality would create some interesting outcomes when people can define how they appear to others based on those others' relative scores. Zoomers seem to be willing to adopt something like this, notice how the prevalence of cheating in online games is leading to increasingly intrusive countermeasures, and then add on behavior/toxicity scores. That is, they're willing to accept a panopticon-esque policing systems if it means avoiding unwelcome interactions in the games. So these sorts of systems could just hop straight over to the real world with AR. And on the one hand, a 'gentle' type of behavior regulation is quite possibly a positive development for reigning in antisociality (but who defines that?). But as you say, if the punishment is something like having your eyeballs shut off or being made literally invisible to all other people, and having to desperately cowtow and beg for positive ratings to regain status, well, I don't want to be part of this future. • •
TIRM faceh 2hr ago antisociality It would be things like denying that transwomen are women that would get you in trouble. • •
WhiningCoil faceh 7hr ago We'd be seeing something like that in some of the more aggressive dictatorships around the world before we saw it in the West, I think. Not that it's too much solace. I wish I could believe this. But frankly our social media overlords have instituted speech regulation regimes just as bad, and virtually indistinguishable in effect, from the most aggressive dictatorships. To say nothing of all we've learned from the Twitter files and whistleblowers at Facebook and Google about their own constitution violating relationships with Federal government agencies. IMHO, the allure of gooning 24/7 with AR will be all it takes to convince a significant portion of the population to submit to a reality censorship regime. • •
faceh WhiningCoil 7hr ago Yes, I think there's a distressingly high number of people who would willingly plug into the 'matrix' and never unplug. For the older people, there's the promise of not having to be stuck with their own failing health and decrepitude. For the young, the ability to live up to all that potential they thought they had, and to pretend to achieve milestones that they are missing in real life. And porn, of course. I can't say that I'm NOT tempted by the allure of infinite AI-generated sex partners who are willing to cater to literally any whim you might have, rendered in high enough definition that your brain doesn't really care that it knows it is fake. But again, increasing ties to the real world. Sexual intimacy with a committed partner and all the mess, neurotransmitters, and weird physical sensations it can entail is probably going to continue to be more 'authentic' than any virtual experience until they can manage direct neural stimulation. And getting another human pregnant and producing offspring is still, in my view, the ULTIMATE entanglement with reality most humans are capable of. Literally enmeshing your genetic code, thousands upon thousands of genes, with another person to produce something new and unique that will then go forth to have further influence on reality. We're a long ways from simulating THAT in high fidelity, I think. • •
thrownaway24e89172 naïve paranoid outcast faceh 6hr ago And porn, of course. I can't say that I'm NOT tempted by the allure of infinite AI-generated sex partners who are willing to cater to literally any whim you might have, rendered in high enough definition that your brain doesn't really care that it knows it is fake. Any whim you might have that doesn't offend the sensibilities of the majority too much anyway. • •
TIRM thrownaway24e89172 2hr ago They sell child sex dolls. Someone will make a child version of future VR super-porn. • •
thrownaway24e89172 naïve paranoid outcast TIRM 2hr ago
newI don't think child sex dolls, which I'll note do have legal restrictions in a number of places (eg, at least 5 US states, Canada, and the UK), are the best comparison here. I think such VR is more likely to be treated like pornography and thus more strictly regulated than sex toys through existing obscenity laws. • •faceh thrownaway24e89172 6hr ago True, but the current trend of nearly every sort of kink and sexual proclivity finding at least some mainstream cachet might be extrapolated forward to say that in the future NO sexual behavior is off-limits so long as it is purely digital in nature. Not a prediction, just a note. • •
ThisIsSin A psychosexual analysis of the worlds and words of George Orwell faceh 4hr ago nearly every sort of kink and sexual proclivity With the small exception of wanting it with attractive young women, sure; you can have all the sex you want as long as the participants are sufficiently ugly (the symptoms of this being things like PornHub recommending you drag queens and other nastiness when you type "teen" in the search bar; there was a thread earlier this year discussing this but I don't remember which week). Orwell didn't call it the "Junior Anti-Sex League" or point out that the availability of the bog-standard kink pornography for proles was maximized within the first couple chapters of his book for no reason: the kink porn is the distraction, making things ugly forever except for those in power is the end goal of power. in the future NO sexual behavior is off-limits so long as it is purely digital in nature. Liberals and progressives are different; the latter continues to wage holy war on loli (and seeks to expand its definition, #fightfor25) while exempting everything else for this reason. • •
thrownaway24e89172 naïve paranoid outcast faceh 5hr ago From my perspective the trend is the opposite, with the things I'm interested in becoming more and more off-limits--a change largely driven by the same people pushing for the wider acceptability of other kinks and sexual proclivities. • •
WhiningCoil faceh 6hr ago And getting another human pregnant and producing offspring is still, in my view, the ULTIMATE entanglement with reality most humans are capable of. Literally enmeshing your genetic code, thousands upon thousands of genes, with another person to produce something new and unique that will then go forth to have further influence on reality. Well, the western worlds plummeting fertility rates don't bode well for this being a sufficient motivating factor. I can totally imagine AR hooking people young, before they are of an age when they are even considering kids. And then it's just over for them. • •
faceh WhiningCoil 6hr ago There's an open question of whether this will just mean that the most pro-natal/fertile groups will end up picking up the slack over a few generations. People with the propensity to check out of society so easily are probably not going to be genetically represented as much in the future. Ultimately, SOMEBODY has to live outside the simulation to keep things running. (I'm intentionally eliding any reference to human-level and above AGI, because that changes the game in several irretrievable ways) • •
WhiningCoil faceh 6hr ago There's an open question of whether this will just mean that the most pro-natal/fertile groups will end up picking up the slack over a few generations. Maybe. But how damaging of a filter would it be if public schools hooked every kid on heroin in middle school and then we waited to see which ones were "strong enough" to get over the addiction and live productive, happy lives as adults and start happy, well adjusted families? I don't view the proliferation of AR much differently. Sure, some version of humanity might emerge from the other side the stronger for it. But it doesn't seem worth the cost if we can avoid it. • •
4bpp このMOLOCHだ！ 1d ago · Edited 1d ago Freddie deBoer has a new blog post out, in which he argues about that there is an unjustified double standard between lefties being quite willing to accept environmental impacts on outcomes including in particular intelligence, such as lead exposure, actively hostile to genetic impacts, as the circumstance that its baseline value is most likely highly heritable. He also leads the article with the observation that they are simply avoidant about the intermediate case of premature birth, which has a documented high adverse impact on intelligence, but while being non-heritable is as arbitrary an seemingly beyond our current capacity for intervention as the genetic ones are. However, this point does quickly take a back seat to the environment/genetics disparity, and I think his core thrust is in the following paragraph. I have often wondered why environmental influences on academic performance appear somehow more “polite” than genetic, to many people. I think it has something to do with the assumption that they cannot be changed, which again leads to fears of leaving children behind. As committed critics of behavioral genetics often point out, just because a condition is influenced by genetics does not mean that the condition necessarily cannot be changed. But then, the obverse is also true - just because an influence is environmental does not mean it can be changed. I have seen this question come up in "hereditarian left" (h/t to Scott) discussions repeatedly, and I'm surprised at the surprisal, because it seems to me that there is an obvious answer. Even though it has slightly fallen out of fashion in the atomic age, the idea that ambitions failed and injustices suffered by one generation can be vicariously made up for in the next is well-rooted in our culture. People on the left and right alike have some version of these stories that they enjoy, such as those involving Latin American immigrants braving jungles/cartels/CBP to pick pomegranates in the California sun until they die from skin cancer at age 50 but at least they get to send their Dreamer kids to a good state school and thence into the American white-collar life, or the middling academic/craftsman/artist/feudal lord/tiger mom giving up on their childhood dreams and instead going all in on raising their offspring to have more of a head-start at the family calling than they did, or just any historical concentration of misery that was on the causal path to our present prosperity (slavery, war, the industrial revolution). If intelligence is the sine qua non of worth and attainment, someone who is cognitively lacking because of lead poisoning or FAS, was born prematurely, raised by wolves or dropped on their head too much still can have smart children; like in these stories, their personal failure may be tragic, but the their tale may yet end in some form of redemption (you could in fact even think that cosmic justice will balance the scales, as the children will be able to turn their experience of hardship into an advantage - be it in the form of grit and experience or good material for the admissions essay). But if intelligence is heritable, then many of the people who must suffer in this world will also never find succour in the genetic afterlife: not only are they themselves stupid losers, but so will be all their descendants in direct proportion to the degree to which these descendants are of their own flesh and blood and positive weight in the value function. (Sorry for the stilted prose. I'm too sleep-deprived to be writing, but I figured that my attention span for this topic wouldn't last long enough that I'd still bother to post post-sleep.) • •
Felagund 4bpp 1d ago I think many people are more okay with saying that some individuals are smarter than others, due to genetics, who are not okay with saying that some racial groups are smarter than others. (And probably, though it amounts to nearly the same thing, people are more willing to say that groups are above average, but not that groups are below average—it's probably a lot less culturally fraught to say that Asians or Jews tend to be smart, than to argue that other groups are low-IQ.) So I'm not sure how that affects this. Because it's concern about classes of people, if undergoing some environmental problem doesn't cause one to think of a class as inherently less smart (on average), possibly due to the temporary nature of the effect, or because the class of people who experienced the harm are not along the lines that peope might tend to identify along, then that make people more comfortable with the environmental factors. • •
Goodguy 4bpp 1d ago You make an interesting point, but I think that in reality the vast majority of people who get the ick from intelligence hereditarianism do so because for them it is axiomatic that human races do not differ in intelligence and that anyone who questions the truth of that is almost certainly a racist who is motivated by a desire to hurt non-white people. To be fair, a large fraction of the people who question the truth of that really are motivated more by a political agenda rather than by a simple desire for truth, which muddies the waters. • •
4bpp このMOLOCHだ！ Goodguy 1d ago I get the sense that I've seen the same resistance to intelligence hereditarianism in many societies where racial/ethnic averages were not much a topic in the public debate (ex. Germany around 2000), so it may not be appropriate to generalise from the Anglo-American societal experience. • •
netstack Texas is freedom land 4bpp 1d ago I’ll second what @guesswho said—at least in the US, the subject has been politicized for decades. It really was a weapon in the battle over public schooling and other forms of segregation. As with all such weapons, when someone new picks it up, opponents are going to draw the same conclusion. • •
Southkraut Rise, ramble, rest, repeat. 4bpp 1d ago There is no broad, social consensus on this topic in Germany. For many Germans, the heredity of intelligence is variously a plain fact of nature or either implicitly taboo or explicitly denied, and these positions do not map cleanly to political leanings even though leftist ideologues do obviously prefer a blank slate reading, but are also obviously motivated by moral concerns rather than any intention to state objective truth. But mostly it's just not a headline topic. • •
f3zinker Its A/B testing all the way down Southkraut 1d ago This got me thinking. Is there any society out there that just accepts HBD and moves on ? As in takes it as a matter of scientific fact. At the very least, doesn't taboo the idea of IQ? • •
tikimixologist f3zinker 21hr ago In India it's generally accepted - tambrams are smart, Punjabis proud, gujus good at money, etc. It's not a major topic, more just something of occasional intellectual interest. India also has open and honest affirmative action/quotas, and data on entrance exam scores of reservation admits vs general pool are easy to find. • •
2rafa tikimixologist 5hr ago That’s similar to cultural stereotypes about cheap Dutch, profligate Italians, lazy Spaniards, humorless Germans and so on, I don’t know that the average Indian believes that Brahmins are genetically more intelligent than other castes and in fact a lot of Indian media seems to be about people from humble backgrounds outwitting those from wealthier ones. It’s kind of like how Americans often buy into stereotypes about Asians being good at math, but if you actually ask them “are Asians more intelligent than white people because of their genetics” they’ll say no. • •
The_Nybbler Does not have a yacht 2rafa 5hr ago It’s kind of like how Americans often buy into stereotypes about Asians being good at math, but if you actually ask them “are Asians more intelligent than white people because of their genetics” they’ll say no. Those that understand the question know the acceptable answer, so that doesn't really tell you anything. • •
2rafa The_Nybbler 4hr ago I don’t believe any great fraction of American whites - including those who would pride themselves on an opposition to political correctness - believe in their heart of hearts that East Asians are hereditarily intellectually superior to Europeans on average. They may believe they’re better at math or more successful in life or even ‘smarter’ in the colloquial non-HBD sense where studying hard at school makes you smart. But they ascribe that to tiger moms and forcing kids into tutoring and pressure to perform and studying all day etc, not to anything ingrained. • •
RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! f3zinker 21hr ago Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, he had a bunch of speeches where he pointed out the statistics and explained this was why he wasn't going to demand equality of outcomes or introduce affirmative action. He was big on IQ too. “I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils... I didn't start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, and then bullying my way to the top, that is the conclusion I've come to.” • •
2rafa RandomRanger 5hr ago · Edited 5hr ago I think LKY believed in HBD but the official policy in Singapore that he started and encouraged definitely doesn’t promote the idea that Chinese are smarter than Indians or Malays and in fact is very big on affirmative action, promoting the idea that someone from any background can do anything etc. LKY used ethnic quotas to rebalance numerous professions to replace the British (arguably HBD-aware) colonial system in which different groups found niches based on ability (eg merchants, soldiers, administrators). • •
IGI-111 f3zinker 23hr ago · Edited 23hr ago Lots of historical examples, most caste systems or organic society concepts are a way to make sure society explicitly caters to the interests of all strata and to maintain social cohesion in the face of the plain reality that some people are just better than others at most useful tasks. You can be a smart cookie and a great conqueror, but noblesse oblige. And even if you're the most backwards idiot peasant, you still have a role and a duty in the great machinery of your nation and the universe. I think the current hangup about this is actually fairly odd and specific to Liberalism and offshoots because it was explicitly founded on tabula rasa. Most people throughout history were very ostensibly aware that intelligence (and character in general) is heritable. • •
roche IGI-111 22hr ago Reminds me of that study which asserted social mobility has no major impact on who ends up where, as if there's a small-ish contingent of people who keep bumping up against the glass ceiling in low-mobility environments, but as a rule we're born into specific strata for a reason. There is some combination of intelligence, stability, drive, and health which is handed down genetically and which nearly all successful people share. • •
Goodguy roche 21hr ago Can't much of this wealth persistence be explained by people passing their wealth to their descendants rather than by intelligence, stability, drive, or health? • •
sodiummuffin Goodguy 20hr ago There's been some studies looking at historical cases like land lotteries indicating that randomly-obtained wealth doesn't tend to persist across generations. Off the top of my head this SSC post has some discussion of this. Similarly, the children and grandchildren of those who were sent to the gulag in the Soviet Union are today more likely to have a college education than the descendants of those who were not, and the areas where they were resettled to are now more prosperous. The gulag may have taken away everything else, but it disproportionately targeted groups like educated professionals, and those that survived still had their genes. Unfortunately it looks like they didn't have individual economic data from the survey, just education, it would be good to confirm that they're individually wealthier rather than having to go by area. • •
guesswho Goodguy 1d ago or them it is axiomatic that human races do not differ in intelligence and that anyone who questions the truth of that is almost certainly a racist who is motivated by a desire to hurt non-white people. The first half of that doesn't have to be true for the second half to be true. In my experience, most of the left agrees with the second half, and believes that there's not compelling evidence to reject the null hypothesis of no difference on the first half (with the caveat that the existing data is suspect for various reasons, largely having to do with the second half). But yeah, within the bailey this is mostly an arguments as soldiers thing. Most people don't know much of the science about this topic and have no reason to care about it except in as much as it affects the political landscape, so when it comes up they're not going to enthusiastically support their opponent's side of the question. • •
doglatine 4bpp 1d ago If your interpretation were correct, you’d surely expect everyone (but especially the left) to be very excited about polygenic embryo screening for intelligence, since it allows people to have children who are significantly smarter than themselves (and once you factor in CRISPR, the sky is the limit). In practice, though, the main people who get excited about polygenic embryo screening tend to be oddball techno-utopians, like many of us here. • •
hydroacetylene doglatine 20hr ago I think that- moral concerns aside- polygenic embryo screening will actually have a dysgenic effect, and crispr will probably make it worse over the medium to long term. ‘But hydro, it can select for higher IQ’- nonsense. In practice it selects for higher IQ people having fewer kids, because well educated upper class people are the natural target audience and it’s absurd to think it won’t suppress fertility among early adopters. And frankly I expect crispr selection for intelligence to be in vogue for about ten years before it switches over to selection for a ‘cute, obedient, phlegmatic temperament and probably athletic’ package. Yes, my bias is obvious. But factually high TFR groups today won’t use eugenics tech, because they’re either religious fanatics or underclass who don’t give a shit, and it won’t cause the people who do use it to have a rise in fertility because their low TFR is not caused by ‘but what if the kid turns out to have a 108 IQ instead of 112?’, it’s caused by not wanting to have to raise kids. I know there’s a motteizean technoutopian crowd which thinks artificial wombs with genetically engineered babies will bring about a rapidly growing 130+ IQ talented tenth. And it would be nice to have more 130+ IQ people around who want to behave in pro social ways, but someone still has to raise the baby for two decades. • •
doglatine hydroacetylene 11hr ago someone still has to raise the baby for two decades It’s not really two decades; more like 13 years or so. As Bryan Kaplan points out, by early teenage years parents are more interested in spending time with the kid than vice-versa. I also expect AI to play a progressively bigger role in parenting. Not so much the physical side (diaperbots may be further away than non-embodied ASI) but AI teachers and entertainers. “Hey Alexa, I have work on my presentation. Can you watch the kids for a couple of hours? Call me if there’s an emergency. Jonnie can watch TV until 6 and then you can help him with his homework.” • •
hydroacetylene doglatine 5hr ago This seems delusional, because AI has a long(some would say infinite) way to go before it has the capabilities of a mark I human teenager. It’s a meatspace task- whether the kid is 8 months or 8 years, if you want him to actually do his homework someone has to keep an eye on him. An AI can’t do it because it is a computer program, and if Alexa controls a shock collar on Johnny AI still has to be able to tell that he’s actually working on his homework and not, say, keeping the screen up while he plays on his game boy. Any 12 year old can do this. AI is a very long ways away. • •
ArjinFerman Tinfoil Gigachad doglatine 11hr ago I also expect AI to play a progressively bigger role in parenting. Not so much the physical side (diaperbots may be further away than non-embodied ASI) but AI teachers and entertainers. “Hey Alexa, I have work on my presentation. Can you watch the kids for a couple of hours? Call me if there’s an emergency. Jonnie can watch TV until 6 and then you can help him with his homework.” Oh god, thank you for giving me one more reason to join the Butlerian Jihad. It wasn't quite enough that hostile teachers try to indoctrinate kids and turn them against their parents, or that Google curates my access to information, let's go ahead and combine the two, and hand the kids' indoctrination over to Google, because the current system is clearly not efficient enough. • •
SSCReader doglatine 1d ago If your interpretation were correct, you’d surely expect everyone (but especially the left) to be very excited about polygenic embryo screening for intelligence, Well that pattern matches to eugenics. Which has a negative rhetorical valence to many people (whether deserved or not). Remember facts matter less than feelings when it comes to the positions most people hold. If position A logically leads to position B, but position B is felt to be bad, then people can simply accept A and not accept B. We are excellent at that as a species. • •
4bpp このMOLOCHだ！ doglatine 1d ago Interesting counterpoint, but I think there are some arguments against it. I can't quite commit to a single line of argument, but think that in reality all of these might be a factor. • The objection to gene editing might exist for orthogonal reasons, such as the usual dystopian fiction priming. Compare to the widespread left-wing opposition to nuclear power (though this seems to have gone through a cycle of sanewashing into a hairier-to-refute "actually nuclear was never profitable to begin with"), or even more relatedly GMOs in nutrition: the idea that nutritional deprivation could be addressed with something like Golden Rice was received somewhere between coldly and with outright hostility, and I imagine you wouldn't want to argue that all these people don't actually want to solve vitamin A deficiency in the third world. I am actually not sure where typical right-wingers can be said to stand on GMOs, beyond a certain expectation of default support because left-wingers are against it and corporations stand to benefit. • Somewhat relatedly, the modern mainstream Left seems to be wary in general of proposed solutions that involve increased individual agency, particularly when exercising that agency correctly is difficult and depends on the confluence of a lot of complex enabling factors. Here I would draw a comparison to the widespread opposition to homeschooling and even school choice in general, even though you might think that if one considers education (as an environmental factor) important and some state schools are bad this would also be the natural response. Leftists surmise, perhaps correctly, that such agency tends to benefit those who are already winning and are better-prepared to make the right choice - indeed, an objection that I hear frequently to human genetic improvement is that rich first-worlders would be the most likely to give their children the best genetic enhancement, widening the gap further (and in particular breaking what little there is left of the karmic mechanism that rich kids squander their wealth but poor kids raise themselves up by their grit). If the person objecting gets drunk and edgy enough, they may even say the other half that if poor people do get access to genetic enhancement they may use it to make kids with Kim Kardashian's bum rather than Stephen Hawking's brain. • Separately, your argument presupposes that people actually, on some level, do accept that intelligence is heritable, and then doublethink it away: a process like "human differences in intelligence are due to genetic differences; such a reality would be far too horrible to accept; I shall therefore pretend to believe that it is not so", rather than "a reality in which human intelligence differences are inherited would be far too horrible to accept; I believe in a moral universe; therefore I earnestly conclude that it is not so". In the latter case, they may not think of gene editing as a candidate solution to the problem of human differences in intelligence at all; rather, it would be a frivolous undertaking that is still subject to the two objections from the previous bullet points - note that "current differences in human intelligence are not due to genes" is not incompatible with "gene editing could introduce inherited differences in human intelligence, such as a caste of superhuman rich white kids". I doubt that most people would constantly live with the cognitive dissonance of the former. • Finally, what do we know about the attitudes towards polygenic embryo screening of people that do actually accept that intelligence is heritable and gives rise to observed human diversity in intelligence? Are there major groups of people who fall in this class and don't belong to either of the three categories (1) apolitical, (2) oddball techno-utopians and (3) motivated racists? (1) will by definition defer their stance on gene editing to people somewhere on the convex hull in opinionatedness and prestige space, (2) is us, and (3) are surely not any more enthused about the prospect of creating new ethnic outgroups that are not intellectually inferior than they are about the existing ones. Also, last time heritability of intelligence was actually a mainstream prestige belief, we didn't have the knowledge base to propose DNA editing, but as far as I understand people were in fact very excited about eugenics. • •
RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 4bpp 21hr ago into a hairier-to-refute "actually nuclear was never profitable to begin with" It's true that they say this (and it is better than saying it's grossly unsafe when coal kills thousands of times more) but they're still lying outright. You can find articles online decrying US nuclear plants receiving subsidies when they're already profitable. https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/586260-profitable-nuclear-plants-dont-need-subsidies-put-the-money-toward/ And then there are the graphs showing that even in America, a toxic regulatory environment, they're usually profitable year over year. Page 388 gives year by year profitability over a bunch of nuclear plants. https://www.monitoringanalytics.com/reports/PJM_State_of_the_Market/2021/2021q3-som-pjm-sec7.pdf • •
sodiummuffin RandomRanger 20hr ago Talking about the year-over-year profitability of something where the cost is overwhelmingly from initial construction is pointless unless you're specifically talking about whether to shut down existing plants. By that standard the business plan of "fill a tank with oil, then pump it out and sell it over the course of 10 years" is a profitable way to generate energy. • •
RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! sodiummuffin 19hr ago It includes capital cost, fuel cost, operating costs. In 2017, seven nuclear plants with a total capacity of 12,658 MW, in addition to Oyster Creek and Three Mile Island, did not recover all their fuel costs, operating costs, and capital expenditures. In 2018, one nuclear plant, with a total capacity of 894 MW, in addition to Oyster Creek and Three Mile Island, did not recover all its fuel costs, operating costs, and capital expenditures. • •
sodiummuffin RandomRanger 18hr ago It includes incremental capital expenditures during that year, in particular estimated maintenance costs. The analysis of nuclear plants includes annual avoidable costs and incremental capital expenditures from the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) based on NEI’s calculations of average costs for all U.S. nuclear plants. Notice how in chart 7-20 the listed capital cost per MWh is identical for almost every plant, even though they would have cost different amounts to make, because it's based on estimated maintenance costs. Or how it can have a large difference between years for plants that are already constructed: NEI average incremental capital expenditures have decreased since their peak in 2012 (45.6 percent decrease from 2012 through 2019 for all plants including single and multiple unit plants). NEI’s incremental capital expenditures peaked in 2012 as a result of regulatory requirements following the 2011 accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/incrementalcost.asp Incremental cost is the total cost incurred due to an additional unit of product being produced. Incremental cost is calculated by analyzing the additional expenses involved in the production process, such as raw materials, for one additional unit of production. In this context, incremental capital cost would be how much more you have to spend on capital per MWh to keep the flow of additional units of electricity coming. • •
RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! sodiummuffin 17hr ago Ok, good point. I missed that part. Even so, many US reactors are paid off which indicates they must've repaid their capital costs, despite the ridiculous operating conditions (including the US's refusal to build a permanent waste dump despite spending billions on the matter). Nuclear energy in more competent countries like South Korea is cheap and reliable, despite political interference. Nuclear energy has been bailing out their expensive coal and gas imports. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/skoreas-nuclear-power-inflection-point-advocate-wins-presidency-2022-03-11/ https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL3N2X403F/ Here's a pro-renewable estimate, since it excludes costs of transmission or connecting to the grid (which will be worse for intermittent, geographically sparse renewables). Nuclear is competitive when compared to anything else, provided operation happens over the long-term (60 years), p46 https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-12/egc-2020_2020-12-09_18-26-46_781.pdf • •
netstack Texas is freedom land 4bpp 1d ago the usual dystopian fiction priming Now I’m a little curious about how much of an effect dystopian fiction has on actual decisions. There’s an obvious angle where policy gets influenced by the general mood on a technology or movement. But the reverse seems just as plausible. If we’re looking back on best-sellers or even cult classics, we’re getting a very curated sip from the firehose. For comparison, there’s a decent amount of mainstream entertainment dedicated to American race relations. It’s hip at the moment. By Sturgeon’s law, a small fraction of it will be good, and will be analyzed or referenced in the coming decades. No matter what happens socially or politically in the coming years, our grandkids are going to assume it was due to the vibes. • •
lagrangian 4bpp 1d ago Finally, what do we know about the attitudes towards polygenic embryo screening of people that do actually accept that intelligence is heritable and gives rise to observed human diversity in intelligence? Are there major groups of people who fall in this class and don't belong to either of the three categories [...] (3) motivated racists? [...] (3) are surely not any more enthused about the prospect of creating new ethnic outgroups that are not intellectually inferior than they are about the existing ones. As someone in all three categories, I think the conclusion here about 3 is sometimes (I'd say often) incorrect. My primary racist complaints would be solved by higher IQ, assuming it came with higher conscientiousness etc. "Those groups that annoy me" with high IQ start to quickly look a lot like "those groups that don't annoy me." So to whatever extent the new outgroups replace the existing low IQ ones, I say - great. • •
4bpp このMOLOCHだ！ lagrangian 10hr ago · Edited 10hr ago I don't know, it seems to me that not being annoyed by any other ethnic group is a rare position for card-carrying racists. Our very own forum went through a period of "soulless amoral bugmen" posting for East Asians, which as I gather is a pretty standard view for European and Caucasian-American (3) \setminus (2) as well; for other major high-IQ groups, a parallel poster already commented. I think it's quite likely that when you imagine other ethnic groups engineered to the average intelligence of yours, you actually also envision them engineered to have your aesthetic and value preferences, which are in reality largely orthogonal to intelligence; this would be hard to achieve in a genetic engineering campaign not only because you couldn't get the targets of the engineering on board, but also because you couldn't get the existing intelligent and successful ethnic groups to agree on what aesthetic to engineer in. (Imagine the heated debate in the International Congress of Racists about what level of Blind Filial Piety the New African Man ought to have.) (Also, I would think of (1) as mutually exclusive with the others...) • •
aqouta 4bpp 6hr ago Our very own forum went through a period of "soulless amoral bugmen" posting for East Asians Did we? • •
hydroacetylene aqouta 6hr ago Yes, the guy who posted about Chinese babies constantly. • •
hydroacetylene lagrangian 1d ago I dunno, the Twitter DR seems not to like Brahmins or Jews much. • •
Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast hydroacetylene 18hr ago The part about conscientiousness also being important is probably the piece of the puzzle you’re missing. DR complaints about Jews (outside of a few cranks like Neema Parvini doing a contrarian bit to make a point) do not actually deny the high IQ and considerable talents of Jews not Brahmins. Their complaint is that both groups are amoral, ethnonarcissicistic strivers who use their cognitive gifts to achieve selfish and/or malevolent ends. High IQ is only an unalloyed good when paired with a conscientious desire to do good and to play fairly. • •
4bpp このMOLOCHだ！ Hoffmeister25 10hr ago · Edited 10hr ago What's an example of an ethnic group that's generally considered by racist members of another ethnic group to not be amoral and ethnonarcissistic (the "striver" part probably comes for free whenever there is conscientiousness, which would surely be introduced as part of any uplift genetic engineering)? (I suspect that this sentiment is more or less equivalent to "I'm okay with other ethnicities being competent as long as they use that competence for the benefit of mine rather than their own".) • •
Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 4bpp 8hr ago What's an example of an ethnic group that's generally considered by racist members of another ethnic group to not be amoral and ethnonarcissistic Finns would be an obvious example. Unassuming, introverted, conformist, and, in the modern era, pathologically welcoming to other ethnic and racial groups. Sweden would be a very notable example of the latter tendency. Look at what the influx of Somalians and Syrians has done to their country. And it’s not just Swedes in Sweden; Scandinavian-Americans in Minnesota are a full-on prey species at this point, with black and Somali gangs and political machines turning what was once one of the most well-functioning and high-QOL regions of the country into a basket case. Look, I’ve defended Jews in this space a number of times. But claiming that they’re just getting the exact same criticisms that every high-IQ ethnic groups gets is risible. Jews do in fact have very specific complaints which have been leveled at them consistently numerous times throughout their existence in Europe. Those complaints cannot reasonably be summarized as “I'm okay with other ethnicities being competent as long as they use that competence for the benefit of mine rather than their own". This is a total dodge, rather than a serious attempt to deal with the topic at hand. • •
Stefferi Chief Suomiposter Hoffmeister25 4hr ago Finns would be an obvious example. Unassuming, introverted, conformist, and, in the modern era, pathologically welcoming to other ethnic and racial groups. Well... • •
4bpp このMOLOCHだ！ Hoffmeister25 6hr ago Finns and Swedes Isn't the one making a judgement of them as not amoral and ethnonarcissistic here you, who would also not hesitate to consider Swedish-Americans and Finnish-Americans as belonging to your own ethnicity? I am not so sure that racists who outgroup them would actually agree with that assessment (and I am not willing to consider the mere clannishness of Somalians and Syrians to qualify as racism; that in my eyes requires believing in the inherent superiority of one's macroscopic genetic cluster rather than just "I stick up for my family because that's the Right Thing to Do"). Surely, racist Asians, Jews and African-Americans seem to push the line that all the Caucasian peoples around them are amoral and ethnonarcissistic. Those complaints cannot reasonably be summarized as “I'm okay with other ethnicities being competent as long as they use that competence for the benefit of mine rather than their own". Huh? What are standard racist complaints about Jews apart from (1) severe ingroup preference (i.e. they are competent and use that to their own benefit) and (2) a distinct style of wordceldom/"Jewish physics"/the differing aesthetics that are seen as particularly disagreeable to the speaker? • •
Jiro Hoffmeister25 6hr ago Those complaints cannot reasonably be summarized as “I'm okay with other ethnicities being competent as long as they use that competence for the benefit of mine rather than their own". Yes they can. People are normally racist against other ethnicities when those ethnicities are around. There are a limited number of other ectnicities that are around. • •
lagrangian hydroacetylene 19hr ago That tracks, I'm Jewish • •
TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra doglatine 1d ago Idk, I think if there were somehow a guarantee that embryo screening would be equally available for all then many lefties would be stoked for it. Unfortunately they have an extremely realistic concern that the rich will be the first to get genetic therapies, which will be expensive, and the intelligence differential will only continue to widen massively. • •
Skibboleth TheDag 1d ago · Edited 1d ago It depends. There are equity concerns, where the rich are going to get the earliest access which will lead to a literal genetic aristocracy (or, perhaps worse, genetic superiority will be used to justify elites' supremacy all out of proportion with the actual impact of such technology). Or that the rich are going to get the safe and effective options while the poor are going to be compelled to accept risky technologies to stay economically competitive. Or something to that effect. However, there's also something something diversity of human experience. On the more reasonable end, you have concerns that parents are going to hyperoptimize for a narrow conception of success over broader flourish, creating a monoculture of [your pejorative of choice for upper middle class professionals]. On the more extreme end, you have the "disabilities are a social construct" crowd, who will declare that you're trying to genocide deaf people by allowing parents to select embryos that don't have congenital deafness. On the other hand, I am reminded of a remark I saw like ten years ago about how transhumanism will never be a thing because when we finally get effective transhuman technologies it will be called "healthcare". I think effective embryo screening will probably win out if it ever becomes possible because the people who want their children to be smart, beautiful, and healthy will vastly outnumber the people who think we're losing some vital part of the human experience. • •
IGI-111 Skibboleth 23hr ago The most likely outcome is that we have a few idealistic people create notorious human disasters, label the disasters after them, say "never again" and proceed to keep doing the few things they did correctly forevermore. It is after all, exactly what happened to eugenics. • •
disposablehead Hipster eugenicist doglatine 1d ago That your kids will be better off if we can cut out the parts of their heritage that make them think like you and replace those parts with contributions from your (no longer only ostensible) betters seems like a cosmic cucking. • •
aardvark2 disposablehead 7hr ago If you have 2 children normally, you do not propagate, on average, about 25% mutations unique to you. If you want everything to continue from you, you need cloning or very difficult genome editing. • •
sun_the_second aardvark2 2hr ago Even that assumes your mutations are unique to you, when in fact it's that particular combination of them that is unique. • •
aardvark2 disposablehead 8hr ago East Asians are less smelly than Europeans (who are in turn less smelly than). I, European, would want my children to have genes in this regard, that's only 1 gene. • •
jkf aardvark2 4hr ago Considering the (supposed?) importance of odour to human attraction you are opening your gene line up bigly to some evil genie action with this request. • •
hydroacetylene jkf 2hr ago
newIs this the reason for low oriental fertility rates across nations and cultures? • •jkf hydroacetylene 22m ago
newProbably not -- IIRC it's more of an aid to assortative mating in that people tend to prefer partners who smell like their own family. Maybe it would make it easier for one's sons to pick up Asian girls? • •2rafa hydroacetylene 1hr ago
newThey can’t be that low historically given how many Chinese there are, surely. • •The_Nybbler Does not have a yacht aardvark2 7hr ago Said by someone who has never been on a bus in Seoul. There's environmental factors, man. • •
aardvark2 The_Nybbler 7hr ago Low effort 'gotcha'. Educate yourself: non-functional variant of gene ABCC11 which has near 100% frequency in East Asia reduces earwax and armpit smell. I never said East Asians are completely odorless. Where were you in Seoul, did your compare everything-adjusted buses of Koreans, Europeans and Africans on how they smell? • •
Fruck Lacks all conviction aardvark2 1hr ago
newActually the most important element is the bus. For some reason we have been engineering buses over the decades to make them nigh perfect mobile bo incubators. The first buses didn't stink at all actually - they were like covered wagons with rows of pews in the bed, open to the air and everything. But the bus travellers didn't smell enough, so we remade them with windows on the sides to trap in the odours. Then we perfected our technique - rearrange the seating so we can cram as many people in as possible. Take out the long skinny windows near the roof that let in air and replace them with giant full body windows that can't be opened, just let in the sun to cook everyone up and get them sweating. Put in air conditioning and then have it break down at least half the time. I assume the final step will involve sealing the bus and adding heated stones and jugs of water. • •sun_the_second disposablehead 1d ago Just because your genes tell you to reproduce them as perfectly as possible does not mean it's a good idea. You would prefer your child to remain weak where you are weak, no stronger than you where you are strong? All for the sake of "genetic heritage", a particular contribution of aminoacids that will dilute to 50% already as you merge your gamete with a partner's? This is an attempt to derive your goals from how your biology works that is as backwards as wireheading yourself. In reality, nearly all parents I observe do not want their child to think like them. They want them to think perhaps the same things, but better. • •
disposablehead Hipster eugenicist sun_the_second 1d ago A list of possible genetic modifications: 1. Fixing obviously broken genes; curing cystic fibrosis 2. Introducing novel genes not native in the human distribution; shark immortality, octopi neurons 3. Replacing all deleterious variants with beneficial variants sourced from across the human genome; fixing heart disease, dementia 4. Replacing all deleterious variants with genes from Chad Chaddicus, who is the perfect human specimen; maximizing population longevity, IQ 5. Replacing all genes from you and your partner with genes from Chad Chaddicus, the perfect human specimen; maximizing aesthetic beauty of the new human race 1 seems obviously good, 2 feels prometheian with large risks and benefits, 3 seems fiddly but cool if reality is kind enough to evenly distribute genetic health across all of humanity. 5 means you’re erased. Gnon has decided that the things that make you you are not worth holding on to, that the future belongs to a rival who through no particular personal effort ended up with the whole of the future, you get nothing, you loose, good day sir. 4 depends on your proximity to Chad. If Chad is your cousin(let’s call this 4+), sweet, you had most of those genes anyway, your kids just get a light tune-up. If Chad is from a rival population with whom you have beef(4-), then the future belongs to the [insert ethnic slur here]. Human destiny is your blood-enemy living in the skins of your grandchildren, forever. PvP is a default setting for human cognition. I don’t think you can get people to entertain the possibility of 4- in a serious way; see the static conversation on the Black-White IQ gap. When group A says “Huh, looks like this objective metric shows group A is just better than B,” group B hears, correctly, fighting words, even (especially) if A is correct. ‘Same thoughts but better’ is step 3 on a process that gets your thoughts and values thrown on the dungheap of history a few iterations later. • •
sun_the_second disposablehead 12hr ago · Edited 12hr ago Once 2 and 3 are achieved, it appears trivial to have "native" aesthetics and Chad Chaddicus hardware. The PvP instincts seem (thankfully), like all evolved whims of biological beings, to be mostly skin-deep, even if the differences aren't. I doubt anyone but the most intellectual racists (as opposed to instinctual racists) will care that their children's leg muscles originate from Kenya, social acumen from Ashkenazim and focus capability from Asia, so long as they look "like them, but with a tune-up" and inherit the same memes. Speaking of memes, you appear to be either not noticing or severely downplaying the effect that shared memes have on perceived kinship. And to expect your memes to be eradicated if you introduce another genepool into yours might be justified when you live in caveman times, where this means you've been invaded and your women were taken into another culture. In a society that has routine genemodding, the correlation of genes and memes ought to be recalculated. In any case, are you arguing that genemodding ought to be seen as cucking by you and me, or that it will be seen as such by most? • •
disposablehead Hipster eugenicist sun_the_second 4hr ago Memes and genes aren’t cleanly distinct; genes dictate what memes are palatable to a population, and memes dictate which genes are desirable enough to propagate. Joseph Heinrich has written good stuff on this. I’d also gesture towards the genetic similarities of friend groups, or the increased incidence of abuse with step-parents. I want GMO kids, but I think I’m close enough to our hypothetical Chad that they would still feel like my own children. If instead they turn out to be brilliant but agreeable bureaucrats then I’m not interested. • •
2rafa disposablehead 54m ago
newI think the point is that for most people it is about aesthetics. Indians and Malaysians and Japanese won’t want ‘white’ kids but their designer babies will look like biracial white-and-themselves versions of them. And that’s what most people would be content with. • •sun_the_second disposablehead 3hr ago It doesn't appear that the coupling of memes and genes is that tight. The material capabilities and capacities of civilizations (i. e. environment) affect both the meme palatability and the extent to which the memes are capable to affect sexual selection a great deal. Incidence of step-children abuse looks explainable enough by the plain issue that parenthood would often be only incidental for the non-genetic parent. They married the father/mother, the kid wouldn't be their first priority even if they're amicable. As for genetic similarities between friends - sure, I can see how there'd be a correlation, given that you'd need to share a language, often location, some interests, necessitating a shared non-aversion to those interests... Would have to read the study to know if it's pronounced enough to necessitate some special focus on "genetic correlation". What I'm getting at... if the kid popped out of you and you raised them, I doubt that the intellectual knowledge that their genes have been altered would affect the instinctual attachment much, unless you let yourself be convinced that not sharing genes is bad. A kid that I sired which was then modified doesn't appear harder to love than my own vanilla kid, to me. If they came from a sperm bank - sure, there'd be visceral aversion to raising the spawn of some actual, personified Chad. But otherwise, it feels more important to me to pass on my memes. Perhaps it caters to my pride more to think of myself as a collection of ideas that lived in a smart monkey body, rather than a smart monkey that had some ideas. Would you rather raise the child of your enemy to be your most ardent ally, or have your child be raised by your enemy to be their most ardent ally? • •
aardvark2 sun_the_second 8hr ago so long as they look "like them, but with a tune-up" and inherit the same memes. how we will know if 300 IQ engineered Russians would be still Russians? If they annex planets on first opportunity and say "cyka blyat", they are. • •
hydroacetylene aardvark2 2hr ago
newBut they sold the rocket fuel… • •sun_the_second aardvark2 2hr ago
newIf that's a joke, then sorry, this is the place where something like that might be argued completely sincerely so I failed to laugh. • •4bpp このMOLOCHだ！ sun_the_second 1d ago Keep in mind, this child is still you. Simply, the best, of you. You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result. Gattaca evidently anticipated this concern, but still went on to build perhaps the most important relevant dystopian tropescape in our public culture with the "embryonic selection only" variant. • •
guesswho doglatine 1d ago When polygenic embryo screening is free to every citizen, maybe the left will get excited about it. Until then it's just GATTACCA, another way for the rich to give their offspring even more advantages over everyone else. • •
Hyperion guesswho 1d ago Are you such an egalitarian you would prefer people be born less intelligent, strong and healthy than they could be, just because some other people don't get the same benefit? GATTACCA is fiction, a fine movie, but it's fiction. You shouldn't generalize from fictional evidence! • •
sun_the_second Hyperion 8hr ago If you could make someone a physical God, would you do it with the same readiness whether: 1. it would be you 2. it might not be you 3. it is for sure not you, but someone you agree with 4. it might be someone you disagree with 5. it will for sure be someone you disagree with? Do you really have to be "such an egalitarian" to be apprehensive about giving a subset of people such an advantage over others? • •
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42 Hyperion 23hr ago Are you such an egalitarian you would prefer people be born less intelligent, strong and healthy than they could be, just because some other people don't get the same benefit? I for one don't need to be an egalitarian, just selfish and look at, me and my genetics and my bank account. Large-effect genetic technology that will be available to members of the millionaire class but not my family? If it becomes a thing, the price-point better come down soon or I will, dunno, despair. And no need to argue from fictional evidence. We have seen how highly unequal human societies have played out since the dawn of agriculture. There was a great deal of unpleasantness for the great majority of people. • •
guesswho Hyperion 1d ago First of all, when were we talking about me? Second, when did we jump from not being 'very excited' to, what,. wanting to ban it or something? • •
ulyssessword guesswho 18hr ago First of all, when were we talking about me? When you replied. That's usually how it works. Second, when did we jump from not being 'very excited' to, what,. wanting to ban it or something? As far as I can tell, in that sentence right there. • •
ArjinFerman Tinfoil Gigachad Hyperion 1d ago · Edited 1d ago Are you such an egalitarian you would prefer people be born less intelligent, strong and healthy than they could be, just because some other people don't get the same benefit? Yup, I'd take one for the team. It's not even about equality, it's about turning humans into something to be deliberately engineered. Gatacca barely scratched the surface of where that leads to, though Darwin is of course wrong about when the left will get excited about it. They're already pushing it in some countries, and they're promoting a bunch of other human engineering technologies from euthanasia to surrogacy. • •
hydroacetylene 4bpp 1d ago I think you’re getting at a major difference between progressives and conservatives- progressives believe that utopia is doable and making progress towards utopia is the most important thing. Conservatives believe it isn’t and not making it worse is the most important thing. Pretty much everyone is upset with the status quo in America. But looking at the complaints- progressives complain ‘we haven’t improved on real wages since x date’, conservatives on the exact same thing complain ‘housing has gotten less affordable because of price growth compared to wages’. These are very similar statements but framed differently. It’s an occasional theme of my posts that western society is definitely post-Christian in a way that it isn’t post-Islamic or post-pagan. I think this is connected very well here; key to Christianity is the concept that we had perfection once, ruined it, and this world is fallen and can’t be restored by human action, we will attain perfection only in the next life. Conservatives being, well, conservative, still hold onto that Christian concept even when they sleep in on Sunday mornings. Progressives keep the concept of the fallen world and believe that we can attain perfection here- we can fix it. This is a very post-Christian dichotomy to hold to. • •
guesswho 4bpp 1d ago · Edited 1d ago I feel like this has to be performative ignorance from deBoer to at least some degree, right? Like... It's impolite to talk about the genetic component of intelligence because it's been a historic justification for all types of oppression and atrocity, from slavery and colonialism to restricting rights and excluding from professions to just generic racism and sexism. It's impolitic to talk about the genetic component of intelligence because we're in the middle of a culture war over equity vs equality, and one side wants to use 'genetic low intelligence' of various groups as their explanatory variable for why equality of opportunity doesn't produce equality of outcomes. It's low-status to talk about the genetic component of intelligence because all the salient examples of everyone at every point in the past who has done that has ended being laughably and disastrously wrong, and over-correcting by not talking about it has more social dignity than saying 'yeah everyone else who ever said anything like this was hilariously wrong in hindsight but I have actually figured it out and am definitely correct this time.' It's not rocket science! deBoer might think those are bad reasons to not talk about it, but they're really obvious and salient reasons that people talk about all the time! Freddie deBoer may be the type of high-decoupler who doesn't even think about all that context and consequence when discussing a topic that he considers scientific rather than political or social. But it's hard to imagine he's actually baffled about why other people care about those things, and how it affects their behavior. (also, you know, everyone cites heritability statistics taken within low-variance populations such as college freshmen, but heritability is inversely proportional to the environmental variance in your sample) • •
aardvark2 guesswho 7hr ago because all the salient examples of everyone at every point in the past who has done that has ended being laughably and disastrously wrong Reality: Judicial predictions of reduction or elimination of the RAG through color - based decisions approached the l udicrous. In rendering the decisive vote on the High Court decision Grutter vs. Bolling (539 U.S. 2003) and endorsing a continuing legality of quotas, Justice Sandra Day O ’ Connor averred, “ ...the Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences of social performance will no longer be necessary. ” In 2012 and having concurred with Justice O ’ Connor in the 2003 ruling, Justice Breyer acknowledged evidence of the unchanging RAG but noted only nine of the 25 years had passed. Puzzled by remarks of Justices O ’ Connor and Breyer, Otis Graham , writing in the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal , recalled the 1976 statement of Constance Baker Motley, an African - American judge, at a Conference on Affirmative Action at the Center for Studies of Democratic Institutions: “ I despise the necessity of reverse discrimination but I swear to you we will end it in 25 years.” Twenty years had passed when Graham noted this in 1997, and it is now 16 years since then. • •
aardvark2 guesswho 8hr ago of everyone at every point in the past who has done that has ended being laughably and disastrously wrong what? what? what was 19th century Francis Galton and early eugenicists wrong about? Right now, your tribe restricts access to genetic databases. • •
RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! guesswho 21hr ago laughably and disastrously wrong The cost of affirmative action and interracial redistribution is vast. Trillions of dollars gone down the drain, destruction of urban centres, the toleration of gross institutional incompetence, a long-term drain on economic productivity and a source of political strife. • •
guesswho RandomRanger 18hr ago That seems like a pretty extraordinary claim. Happy to examine any extraordinary evidence you have for it. • •
RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! guesswho 16hr ago It stands to reason that affirmative action reduces productivity, which is the primary source of economic growth. Everything from non-competitive government grants to minority businesses, corporations hiring diverse rather than competent workers and being unable to fire them, legal costs, huge diversity bureaucracies... Decade by decade, all around the West, that adds up. Plus there's been well over a trillion in aid sent off to Africa. If you have any specific questions, I'd be happy to provide specific evidence. I'm rather interested by this statement: It's low-status to talk about the genetic component of intelligence because all the salient examples of everyone at every point in the past who has done that has ended being laughably and disastrously wrong I struggle to see how everyone who talked about the genetic component could be laughably wrong. Those of us who believe in evolution have little choice but to recognize genetic differences in intelligence, just as there are genetic differences in height, weight and every other factor. • •
Sloot RandomRanger 19hr ago In particular, subsidization of the survival and reproduction of negative fiscal, low human capital populations within and across countries. • •
2rafa RandomRanger 21hr ago That’s not redistribution, that’s social engineering. The latter can involve a form of the former, but it’s entirely possible to have redistribution, even reparations, without destroying the inner cities or political strife. The key is whether redistribution is designed to achieve some form of equality of whether it’s simply designed to improve the quality of life of the recipient population. I think social stability in the USA likely requires some measures by the majority that support the black minority, but it’s the nature and purpose of those measures that should be debated. • •
RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 2rafa 18hr ago But the engineering is designed to redistribute. It involves the mobilization of resources which are produced by whites, whether that's goods or more intangible things like good neighbourhoods, companies or schools, university entrance placements... These resources are used to advantage blacks. Necessarily that will mean disadvantaging whites and Asians compared to if there was no such redistribution. White kids get bussed to black school districts and get beaten up while the legal and educational establishment look the other way when at all possible. There's nothing the state can do that doesn't have some kind of cost. Now the original plan was that it would be an investment, that after the investment was made the problems would disappear and you'd have all these great black scientists, engineers and so on. Social harmony would be greater than before. The investment hasn't paid off after 40-50 years! Such a business model should be scrapped, not revamped and relaunched time and time again. There's no investment case any more, just bribery and betrayal of civilized, meritocratic principles. De facto, US blacks have gotten trillions worth of reparations in welfare and affirmative action. They get their culture celebrated and lauded before the whole world. The death of a black drug addict with dubious morals is blown up into this huge global tragedy worthy of massive riots, the harms blacks cause are swept under the rug. There's no shortage of such stories - teachers strangled and raped by students, women inexplicably executed by black police. US blacks get wealth, they get status and preferential treatment from the authorities. What can more reparations possibly do, other than raise the bar for future demands? I'm considered pretty sympathetic to Russia on this forum but I'd draw the line well before offering Putin an open-ended subsidy to uphold the stability of Europe. That's actual appeasement and of a particularly abhorrent kind. • •
2rafa RandomRanger 17hr ago Even accepting your disagreements it still doesn’t follow that not intervening is preferable. Consider that for all your criticisms of programs that have disproportionately benefited African Americans, African American militancy is down significantly since the 1960s and 1970s. • •
aardvark2 2rafa 6hr ago African American militancy is down significantly since the 1960s and 1970s. It is true, albeit it is also true that African American militancy is up significantly since Jim Crow times. • •
2rafa aardvark2 4hr ago Jim Crow led in part to huge migration out of the South into those large northern cities, and as hydro said many of the nation’s most infamous race riots occurred during it. • •
hydroacetylene aardvark2 5hr ago Jim Crow featured regular race riots. • •
Fruck Lacks all conviction guesswho 23hr ago It's impolitic to talk about the genetic component of intelligence because we're in the middle of a culture war over equity vs equality, and one side wants to use 'genetic low intelligence' of various groups as their explanatory variable for why equality of opportunity doesn't produce equality of outcomes. Is that the explanatory variable you have seen? Because chance is the actual variable. Give two people two dice and the first one to roll snake eyes wins. Equal opportunity, unequal outcome, no discrimination necessary. • •
MartianNight Fruck 22hr ago Chance alone can't explain the differences in outcome between different groups, because the influence of chance on the individual level disappears on the group level. In your analogy: assume 1000 whites and 1000 blacks each roll a die. Now you take all the people who rolled a 6. There will be approximately equal number of whites and blacks in that group. But that's not what we see when it comes to income level, educational attainment, employment rate, life expectancy, crime participation, or a myriad of other metrics that people who care about equal outcomes care about. • •
Fruck Lacks all conviction MartianNight 20hr ago Groups are manufactured. And as you yourself note, individual levels and group levels follow completely different rules. In this setting the white people have an advantage as a group, because they started rolling the dice first, let's say a minute first, but only the people who roll snake eyes actually win. And if you change the rules, to say, give the black people a minute to catch up when the white people can't roll, once again only the people who roll snake eyes will win. Everyone else is a loser, but due to skin colouring you have decided some are winners. Winners who get none of the benefits of winning, but still winners somehow. Equity proponents aren't asking for equality of outcome, if they wanted that they'd focus exclusively on the people with all the money regardless of skin colour, because money is the only thing that will fix those metrics. In reality equity proponents are asking one group of people (poor whites) to suffer even more than usual for strangers because they share their skin colour with another group (rich white people). And spinning up racial tension. It's a repugnant and ridiculous philosophy. • •
TitaniumButterfly guesswho 1d ago · Edited 19hr ago It's low-status to talk about the genetic component of intelligence because all the salient examples of everyone at every point in the past who has done that has ended being laughably and disastrously wrong I don't think so. What are some examples? We're constantly told this but I don't think it's true at all. Our ancestors were pretty sharp and had a pretty solid understanding of racial differences. More likely the 'laughable and disastrous' examples (if any) are being cherry-picked or misrepresented. E.g., blacks really do have smaller skulls (and therefore brains) than whites. But mention this to most normies and they've been trained to roll their eyes at the notion. • •
FiveHourMarathon These hoes don't be mad at Megan, these hoes mad at Meghan's Law guesswho 1d ago It's low-status to talk about the genetic component of intelligence because all the salient examples of everyone at every point in the past who has done that has ended being laughably and disastrously wrong, and over-correcting by not talking about it has more social dignity than saying 'yeah everyone else who ever said anything like this was hilariously wrong in hindsight but I have actually figured it out and am definitely correct this time.' Around the Lunar New Year a Chinese friend and I were chatting about it, and my hot-take was that Chinese Zodiac was the worst of all the Zodiacs because it was like some people are DRAGONS and some people are RATS and that's just stupid. Where the Western Zodiac is at least mostly decent things. You fucking KNOW that the guy who codified the Chinese Zodiac was born in a Dragon year. ((Why yes, my older sister was born in the year of the Dragon while I was born in a shitty animal year, total coincidence...)) I generally distrust any effort to sort people by "types" that is written to clearly elevate the speaker. Richard Florida is vastly guilty of this in all his work on Class in America: he's happy to accurately describe and hilariously send up the foibles of the upper class and the lower class, but then excuses himself from them with his creation of the CREATIVE CLASS who transcend all those hang-ups and are perfect and free of class problems. So often, these kinds of sorting systems are nothing but a method for the proponent to neatly place himself at the top of a "natural" hierarchy. I'm instantly suspicious of them for that reason. • •
Hyperion guesswho 1d ago It's low-status to talk about the genetic component of intelligence because all the salient examples of everyone at every point in the past who has done that has ended being laughably and disastrously wrong, and over-correcting by not talking about it has more social dignity than saying 'yeah everyone else who ever said anything like this was hilariously wrong in hindsight but I have actually figured it out and am definitely correct this time.' They weren't wrong though. Galton was right. Everything he said about intelligence and it's heritability was correct. His estimate of the White-Black IQ gap is nearly identical to the modern estimate. Galton and his heirs were right, it's just that leftists discredited them through propaganda, not by ever refuting the evidence. • •
Sloot Hyperion 20hr ago · Edited 19hr ago A more amusing and egregious example is Morton’s 19th century skull measurements, which found negro skulls had smaller brain sizes than Caucasian skulls. Gould infamously “ahktually”d this claim in a paper and his 1980s book Mismeasurement of Man, attributing any differences in measured brain size to Morton’s racism without putting in the physical work himself. Morton became another punching bag for Pale Stale Males and their evul scientific racism. A team of researchers later went back to remeasure the skulls (around 2011 or so), and found that Morton’s measurements were largely on point. Whoopsy! Yet, Gould was on the right side of history, and Morton and the 2011-ish wrong thinkers were not. The notion of blank slatism, and that human evolution is conveniently skin deep and stops at the neck, remains the dominant paradigm with no sign of being unseated in ${CurrentDay}. Gould remains a well-celebrated scientist and scientific communicator (where the communicator aspect is/was doing a hard-carry for the scientist aspect, like Neil deGrasse Tyson). It was Gould’s emotional truth and good intentions that count. Morton remains in the dustbin of wrong-thinkers. The researchers involved, instead of being celebrated for doing the unsexy but crucial work of replicating and verifying past research, gained a quasi-pariah status, their work at best being a begrudged, inconvenient footnote for what should had been a slam dunk for Gould upon the racists in anthropology textbooks published in the 201Xs and on. • •
Baila 1d ago · Edited 23hr ago A summary of The Socialist Phenomenon by Igor Shafarevich A free online version of the text can be found here. In The Socialist Phenomenon, Shafarevich examines socialism from antiquity to modern times. Throughout the book, he examines the invariant qualities of socialism and attempts to explain its origins, its driving forces and the goal to which it is driving. The book is split into a preface and three parts. In Part One: Chiliastic Socialism, Shafarevich examines socialism in antiquity, socialism of the heresies, and socialism of philosophers. Part Two: State Socialism examines socialism in South America and in the ancient orient. Finally, in Part Three: Analysis, Shafarevich discusses the contours of the phenomenon, surveys a variety of approaches to socialism, examines the embodiment of the socialist ideal, and the relationship between socialism and individuality before progressing to his ultimate analysis of the goal of socialism. This post will cover the preface and the Introduction to Part One.
Preface (p. 9-14) In the preface, Shafarevich introduces his topic and explains his overall approach. He notes that rigorous discussions of socialism are often derailed for a number of reasons, including the copious and contradictory writings of self-avowed socialists. The author’s solution is given by an analogy to religion. Shafarevich finds that while religion has many functions which greatly impact many domains of life, such as social function, and economic function, or a political role, the fact that religion impacts these domains “is possible only because there are people who believe in God and because there is a striving for a union with God which religion creates.” From this perspective, that Shafarevich seeks to uncover the “fundamental tendency” which enables socialism to impact various domains of life. Pursuing this approach immediately leads one to notice a set of apparent contradictions in socialist writings and thought. Proceeding from a critique of a given society, socialism cries out for justice and puts forth a program for a utopia. However, calls for freedom and utopia are nearly always immediately followed with equally strong calls for extreme violence and maximized, regimented coercion. A work entitled “The Law of Freedom” describes an ideal society where in each small commune there is a hangman and anyone who has been remiss or disobedient is flogged or turned into a slave. Being a mathematician by profession, Shafarevich explains that he seeks to find a description of socialism free from contradictions. That is, he seeks to understand socialism from the socialists’ point of view. While we may not be obliged to accept Marx assertion that man has no existence as an individual, only as a class, “why not accept that he is describing a view of the world inherent in certain people….it is quite possible that they are conveying a view of life in which the entire world evokes malevolence, loathing and nausea (as in Sartre’s first novel, Nausea).”
Part One: Chiliastic Socialism Introduction (p. 17-21) Shafarevich begins by stating that: The word “socialism” often implies two quite different phenomena:
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stolen_brawnze I am the way Sia says "batteries" in that one song. Baila 1d ago Please can you cut it out with the humongous title text. I try to read these at work on my phone and don’t have an abundance of privacy (shared space no partitions). Every flick of my thumb risks exposing something ridiculous like “Are the JEWS hiding the TRANS truth about BLACK CRIME?” Yours is fine, but it’s a trend I’d be happy to kill anyway. • •
Rasgard 1d ago Have all my fellow Beyond The Dutiful Chuckle searchers (still left feeling dry by the false prophet of Babylon Bee) heard of FreedomToons? This is it for me, it exists, for sure. Indubitably, conclusively, forevermore, this is where I cease my wandering in the desert and build my house upon the sweet sweet spring of Right Wing Comedy That Is Actually Funny. I mean I've watched about ten videos but this is incredibly promising. Every video is ideologically pleasant, and there's great variety in what's going on in them. They're way more than a string of "left wing doctrine lived precisely goes into absurdist death spin" stylistic tributes to each other. And it goes back years! Hopefully he's always been this good. He seems to be a young guy, maybe young enough to be free of a certain sarky jaded bitterness in the spirit of his work that takes the air out of much right wing comedy, but old enough to look down on TicTocers with grizzled maturity. Highlights: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4_2BYLnii6s The CoronaVirus appears on Fallon Objectively funny! Objectively funny! Fauci brutally beating down the actorly yearings of Classically trained Covid to break free of the politicisation of his work is a concept that will prove eternally ticklish. Sadly, I missed the chance to get an early BTDC with a great gag about the Left Wing Dutiful Chuckle that I would have Right Wing Shouted A Laugh At for sure but I didn't get it smoothly enough. https://youtube.com/watch?v=5blyjF9whN4 TicTocers Try To Understand Relationships If you enjoy the faces and sound effects here see also Tucker Carlson watching the J6 footage. https://youtube.com/watch?v=COThKm3ftTo A Day In The Life Of Jordan Peterson I have probably loaded about 200 hours of JP content down the years and watched 2 cos of his voice, so this video was a classic from the moment of its writing and will be until the heat death of the universe. • •
Southkraut Rise, ramble, rest, repeat. Rasgard 7hr ago This is trash. I regret wasting two minutes on it based on the incorrect assumption that people on the Motte either have taste or the good sense to keep their guilty pleasures to themselves. • •
netstack Texas is freedom land Southkraut 6hr ago I'm afraid I still have to ask you to hold to our usual civility standards. Consider this the most gentle of warnings. • •
jkf netstack 4hr ago Perhaps a gentle note to the producers of lame-yet-lengthy toplevel posts (as is already done with ones that are considered too short) would be a way of improving content without the harsh words. I wanted to write something like this in response to "Big Headings Guy" last week, but couldn't think of a civil way to put it. You may have noticed that this thread is increasingly withering on the vine -- I submit that this may be due to the policy of punishing pithy-yet-interesting content with no equivalent system for the long-yet-boring. (Also overpolicing of civility making people reluctant to post their true opinions at all, but we already talked about that) • •
netstack Texas is freedom land jkf 3hr ago Which content do you have in mind as pithy-yet-interesting? I appreciate that you didn’t make an uncivil response to Big Headings Guy. In the end, someone politely requested smaller headings, and he complied. Is there a problem with this exchange? • •
jkf netstack 27m ago
newIt wasn't the headings (well they were weird too), it was the lengthy repetitive uninteresting content. I much prefer posts of the form [pithy description of culture war event/local happening] [potentially inflammatory (or not) take on said events] [call to discussion/sharing of alternate takes] But people don't make this kind of post anymore, because they are liable to be scolded by the (recently enlarged) mod squad. So instead we get long boring contentless 'effortposts', and are not allowed to let the poster know how lame they are because of course they are apparently in line with the mission statement. • •reactionary_peasant Rasgard 9hr ago I used to watch some of his stuff. The smugness-to-humor ratio is way too high. Uncharitable in the extreme and subtle as a ton of bricks. Yet sadly probably one of the best conservative humor channels out there. • •
non_radical_centrist Rasgard 1d ago I'm generally centrist, leaning right fiscally and leaning left socially. The videos got a couple small chuckles from me but I didn't particularly find him funny and won't be watching anymore. I find Babylon Bee has a lot more jokes that land, although they have a lot that miss too. •
So shines a good deed in a weary world.
The grandparent is filtered. So is the parent of this post.
fixed, thank you for the notice.
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I'm just glad my horrible tab accumulation habit finally accomplished something other than occupying ungodly amounts of RAM for once.
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