domain:npr.org
If MKUltra worked practically, there'd be more signs of its use. The CIA and associated goons wouldn't need to torture people at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, they could just brainwash them!
But more seriously, I never said they could go as far as programming people like computers, just that they could change some of people's beliefs and/or personality, beyond what mass media and the education system allows.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
Their remote viewing was pretty promising too, per various documents. Nobody can fault the Cold War CIA with closedmindedness.
But if remote viewing is so great, why did they spend so much on the U2, satellites, SIGINT? If the US has unconventional propulsion, flying saucers, why would they need the F-35?
If MKUltra worked practically, there'd be more signs of its use. The CIA and associated goons wouldn't need to torture people at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, they could just brainwash them!
Western citizens aren't volunteering to die in Ukraine because the CIA did some trickery, they're doing this because their attitudes and beliefs have been shaped by the media and those around them, they think it's the right thing to do. Some people are easily suggestible and follower-type personalities. I think this website is full of contrarians and individualists who are highly resistant to consensus and passive manipulation, we naturally struggle to model the mindsets of the other end of the spectrum.
(One exception might be the chemicals and hormones we encounter all around in the modern world, which might act as epigenetic triggers making people more cowardly and less rebellious, though it's not clear that this is anyone's plan, per se. You can see the physiognomy of our fathers and grandfathers was totally different to today, some young men are growing breasts because of some chemical, presumably.)
Imaginary_Knowledge
1hr ago
Thanks, I think.
Corvos
1hr ago
Lol. Okay, sometimes it’s a fig leaf.
But from a purely descriptive perspective I would bet that, say, 99% of Madoka Magica slash writers are not paedophiles.
Closedshop
話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分
2hr ago
I'd suggest that all of the groups you listed (barring Japanese, who never existed in large enough numbers to matter) are at least of Christian denomination, and while cultural differences between Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant are large, they're nowhere near as large as the differences between any Christian denomination and Hindu or Islam.
Further, the culture in the U.S. in the 18th century was vastly different from even modern day U.S. culture. Integration and assimilation was both expected and enforced. Nowadays, not only is it not expected, but to suggest that some immigrant group should integrate is treated as racist. You say that nativist backlash against immigration was an integration problem, but I'd suggest that it's the exact opposite. Nativist backlash happens when immigrants do not integrate. Without any pressure from natives, why should immigrants integrate? You see this exact problem in Canada and Europe. Do Indians in Canada behave like Canadians? I don't even mean that they need to stop being Hindu, but do they stop throwing their religious idols into public waterways or stop shitting on public beaches? Do Muslims in Great Britain act British? I don't even mean that they need to convert to Christianity, but do they not stab you for burning the Quran or not harass women for not wearing a covering?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
Appreciate the kind wishes
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Just as a follow-up.
Obama's initial response was to say that "this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy", with 1.1 million likes that probably aren't all from Red Tribe Obama fans
Yeah, there's also bots and Indians. You don't find it odd that with so many likes all the replies are negative? Where are all the like-clicking blue-tribers voicing their agreement?
More like most of us don't have political brainrot.
I've heard that one before, but it makes no sense given the shape of the world we're in right now. Forget Kirk's murder, how do you explain the long stream of MeToo, BLM, lockdowns, TransWomenAreWomen (to the point of putting rapists in women's prisons). I'm sorry, but either the majority of the Blue Tribe wholeheartedly support it, don't care either way - which is political brainrot. The only way it's not is, like I said above, if you're just too terrified of going against your own side.
We don't post on social media
Are you posting from the 00's? The entire Boomer part of my family is online and on SocMeds, most of society is.
We touch grass, talk to our friends, coworkers, and communities and otherwise live out our lives not terminally online.
We have posters here recounting stories of their families, friends, and coworkers making fun of the murder.
Your algorithm isn't going to push our content because there isn't any.
Ok let's say it's my algorithm, link a mainstream left-wing forum, where the news broke, and everybody's aghast at what happened. Note: threads that happened days after the fact, when people had the chance to think about their messaging, don't count. Immediate reacts only.
Wasn't it Scott that said 90% of posts online are from insane people?
I see no reason to take Scott seriously, especially when he says something like this.
Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
3hr ago
Yes, thanks.
Ugliness correlates with high mutation load, which correlates with degenerated genes, which correlates with broken capacities such as higher-order positive personality traits including self-control, planning for the future, and so on. It might seem improbable that the odds of all these things breaking randomly are quite slim, which is true. But the odds of something important breaking randomly in even one generation are actually plenty high. An optimally-aligned person is fairly difficult to generate; most children aren’t quite as aligned as their parents, and, after all, in the game of musical chairs that is life in Tidus, one must only be ever so slightly quicker than the next guy.
There seems to be some kind of quality of 'general alignedness' which breaks across low-pressure generations. I just wrote a more technical post about this here though it's speculative.
So you can lose a large amount of fitness without massive regression on any single trait, just by minor regressions or variations on multiple traits, which aren't inherently linked but are selected for together in a wild environment.
Precisely. And, this compounds rapidly until selection pressure is turned back up.
Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
3hr ago
Do let me know what you decide, and also why.
Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
3hr ago
Short answer, I can definitively say that you've broadly misunderstood me here, and just as definitively guess that this is at least 80% my fault. For one, I have a known bad habit of tacking tangential afterthoughts onto other statements without being clear that they're tangential. In this case your fixation on mutation load occurred to me as strange until I realised that you got there through a very reasonable (but unintended) interpretation of something I said upthread.
Also, while I try to be precise in the chapters, in the comments I'm mostly just shooting from the hip while trying to ignore the yapping of sassy male stewardesses etc, or distracted by the guy next to me in the terminal who's having a spectacularly-loud heart to heart with whoever's on the other end of his phone, or sitting dead-tired on a rock-hard bed in a room I've never been in before and will never enter again. Which is to say: I've admittedly been sloppy here and there, and probably conflated some things I shouldn't have, either due to inattention or just from being lackadaisical.
Pretty much agree with your criticisms of what you understandably thought my position was. Will try to get back to you tomorrow. Can't promise it. Thanks for the questions.
Bartender_Venator
3hr ago
Can't speak for Earendil, but the way I read his theory:
On the height example, this isn't a single trait, but a bunch of traits that all have to be above a certain threshold to have a good shot at surviving and reproducing in a tough wild selection environment. So you can lose a large amount of fitness without massive regression on any single trait, just by minor regressions or variations on multiple traits, which aren't inherently linked but are selected for together in a wild environment. So for instance the average pigeon, whose parents had survived in some tough pigeon environment which was culling a large % of pigeons each generation, regresses or varies just a bit on metabolic efficiency, wingspan, reaction time, uh, beak pointiness, etc., etc., and with the cumulative impact you end up with one that would be fox chow in the wild. That's what I think Earendil means by "general alignment", a basket of traits which are not inherently linked on the genome but are maintained together by selection pressure.
I hear you. I don't know what the mechanism is exactly but can observe the same thing happening over and over again. It's so commonplace in my circles that no one even talks about it. We all just understand, and wordlessly operate under the assumption, that it works this way. (Though we're not working with pigeons and the phenomenon I'm describing is easier to see in our case.)
I have ideas. I try to gesture at them in the book. It's not any one trait. Perhaps it's a sort of weighted basket. But one way or another there's something like 'general fitness alignedness' which just slides over time without selection pressure.
With the multi generational pigeon example it's even weirder - allele frequency shouldn't shift substantially across a few generations with minimal selective pressure in a large flock.
I don't think it does! It's more like certain combinations work better than others and, even if the cards in the deck aren't changing much, as it were, the more times shuffling happens the worse things get. Let me try to lay this out (and take it with a grain of salt; as I said I'm not actually a geneticist by training):
As we know, during meiosis homologous chromosomes pair up and exchange corresponding segments of DNA. Where those crossovers occur is stochastically distributed, but not perfectly random along the chromosome.
Now,
- Each chromosome pair usually undergoes 1–3 crossovers, mostly according to its length.
- Crossovers are regulated so that at least one occurs per chromosome pair (to ensure proper separation), but usually not too many; nearby crossovers interfere with each other.
- Importantly, the location of those crossovers is biased. It's not a truly random walk! They tend to occur in specific 'hotspot' regions where the chromatin is more open and accessible. Other regions of the genome are recombination cold spots (like near centromeres or certain heterochromatin areas).
- Hotspots are largely determined by a gene called PRDM9, which encodes a protein that binds to specific DNA motifs and initiates recombination there. Tellingly(?), the DNA sequences recognized by PRDM9 evolve quickly, so recombination hotspots differ significantly even among closely related species.
- That PRDM9-recognized sequences evolve so rapidly implies to me that they break fairly often as well (but that's a guess and I don't know how to find out).
Therefore, crossing over is 'random', but within critical constraints. It’s like shuffling a deck where certain 'chunks' of cards are more likely to get swapped than others.
So far, so good. I'm 99% certain that no one is going to argue with any of that, though @Chrisprattalpharaptr feel free to jump in.
But my guess, and I stress again that I'm just grasping here, is that in the first generation certain whole chunks which go well together are more likely to get transposed intact, but as the mating game continues they become prone to getting fractured and their constituent pieces ending up in weird combinations that don't work as well with each other.
(If any actual geneticists are reading this please let me know whether that's plausible or if you have a better explanation. If I just rederived someone's thesis I'll be more relieved that I'm not crazy than disappointed that I won't get credit, I promise.)
And if that's not what's happening, I bet it's at least a partial metaphor for whatever is happening.
In nature, including in competitive human societies, this doesn't have as much of a chance to show up in obvious ways except perhaps in protracted boom times. You'd have to be doing something like I'm doing, where specimens bred in captivity over generations are then directly compared with freshly-caught ones in complex trials, and sometimes even released into the wild and observed (where they pretty uniformly do terribly), to notice this. I just don't think there are many eyes on this phenomenon. Which is a shame as it has, to radically understate the matter, serious implications for sociology if true.
Allow me paste a little from chapter six's coda:
Recall our blind cave fish. It may have taken the fish tens of millions of years to evolve their eyes and visual processing system and all the instincts and behaviours which go along with those, but if they go into a cave and don’t come out, their species has typically become completely blind within a few hundred years, and coming back out into the light doesn’t magically mean it’ll only take them that long to get their vision back. Many of those mutations will have to occur again, and as time goes on fewer and fewer of those potentials remain dormant in their blood, waiting to be reawakened.
...
Actually let's stick with foxes and rabbits for a moment. Rabbits are swift, with excellent hearing and winsomely-keen noses. They have been granted all these virtues through their relationships with predators, in this case foxes. If you take rabbits and put them in captivity for several generations, they will lose all of these traits. Without the selection pressure to maintain them they will degrade, and more quickly than you might think. Reintroduce those domesticated rabbits back into the wild and it's possible that even if most don't last five minutes, the very best will survive and go on to re-embody the virtues of their forebears. But I wouldn't count on it.
I think you see now where I'm coming from.
Something else on my mind:
In humans, oogenesis generally has more crossovers per meiosis than spermatogenesis. The distribution of crossover sites differs too: Male crossovers tend to cluster near telomeres, while female crossovers are more evenly spread across the chromosome. But there’s no consistent directional bias; it's not like 'this gene is more likely to be inherited from the mother' at least afaict. It’s more about where and how often recombination happens in each sex.
I don't know yet how this is pertinent but I feel that it is. A major theme in this book is how different men are from women and I'm prone to becoming fascinated by any little hints along these lines.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4hr ago
Or, whichever local religious service seems most appealing to you.
None of them in my area seem to: not the Mexican cult; not the black Baptist church whose webpage advertises events by local Dem politicians; not the Lutheran church whose woman pastor's LinkedIn page has rainbow flags; and not the "you should already be Catholic before setting foot inside" Byzantine Catholic church. (The racist Islander Church appears to have moved or shut down.) None of them seem like they'd be welcoming environments for me (another problem with being a far-right atheist).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4hr ago
I do not think it is going to work out well for Blue Tribe generally.
Why not? It's not like Red Tribe is going to do much more than whine about it, "vote harder," and hope that somehow, this time Left-captured enforcement agencies will start obeying orders from elected Republicans.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4hr ago
Yes, the problem isn't that the Left is violent, it's that we on the Right aren't.
and if the Right wants it to stop, it needs to realize the only way to do it is to use all the force they can bring in to handle it.
Yes. And by "all the force," I, for one, mean all the force.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
4hr ago
I'm curious how you have arrived at (and remained with) these beliefs. You previously listed a couple of evangelical/fundamentalist-type beliefs (the YEC idea that earth is 6,000 years old etc.), that you have dismissed as implausible. Yet you hold this rather staunch belief (stated in the previous set of replies) that sex makes you (one, us) dirty outside the confines of marriage. Your terms macro- and micro-intimacy here seem very tenuously cobbled together. There are many types of intimacy--should all of these be measured out so carefully lest we sully ourselves or dilute what we have to offer some future friend? If sex is different because of its procreative nature, that's of course an argument. But that's not necessarily intimacy. You seem to be attaching a mystical quality to sex--this without ever having had it yourself.
Obviously to some degree you got these ideas from your father, but you've embraced them and I'm wondering why. I wouldn't normally comment in the face of such a long statement laying bare one's experiences, because I'm not sure I have much to offer you other than stay alive and work things out in fear and trembling. But you're digging in here and I'm not positive that you are digging in in a way that is going to help you.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5hr ago
For some reason, they felt this is the thing Free World(TM) needs to defend freedom and fight communism.
It's because the Soviets had the same kind of programs, and they were worried they'd get BTFO'd if the commies have working mind control, but the US does not. At least officially.
Personally I think the whole capitlism vs. communism spat was just a laboratory experiment to find out which form of managing an industrial society is more effective, but both sides would love mind control, and any other technique of reducing humans to cogs.
Eetan
5hr ago
The killing themselves really gives me the spooks. No matter how I try I just can't imagine myself in that person's skull.
For me, it is the exact opposite. I just can't imagine myself committing long list of felonies and capital crimes, and then just ... give up, surrender to face rest of my life in American torture hell prisons.
Eetan
5hr ago
The vast majority of the MK ULTRA program files were destroyed and never released or leaked, so it’s hard to say. There were probably multiple types of techniques tested, and any that were successful were probably spun off into their own programs. In tinfoil hat circles I’ve heard of successor programs called MK NAOMI and MK MONARCH.
The short list of the programs is here.
I suspect some of the techniques of MK ULTRA or other similar programs ended up in mass media. In a democracy, being able to manipulate a huge number of people a small degree could be very useful.
What the professionals were looking for were not better marketing, advertising and PR technologies, not better interrogation and torture methods. By "mind control" they meant actual mind control from pulp science fiction of the time - methods of deleting and rewriting human memory like one deletes magnetic tape, reprogramming human mind like one programs electronic computer, marvel of this age. For some reason, they felt this is the thing Free World(TM) needs to defend freedom and fight communism.
So far, there is no sign it is possible, no sign that anyone in the world has such capability. It would be truly nightmarish world if it was real, world where killing is obsolete, world where they (for value of "they" you fear and hate the most) instead of cutting your head just stick you into machine, and it will turn you into one of "them".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5hr ago
It does, though it strikes me as strange that (let's say for the sake of example) messenger pigeons have such high genetic variance compared to their parents. Naively if it were the case that most combinations of genes don't play well with each other I'd expect a population with less genetic variation to do better than one with more. Unless there's a bunch of genes where the heterozygous variant was advantaged (as happens with humans and sickle cell), but in the longer term I'd expect both alleles to migrate onto the same chromosome in fairly short order (hasn't happened yet in humans because malaria is a pretty new disease).
With the multi generational pigeon example it's even weirder - allele frequency shouldn't shift substantially across a few generations with minimal selective pressure in a large flock. And I can’t imagine the mutation rate is that high either. There's gotta be something else going on with these messenger pigeons.
oats_son
5hr ago
Yeah, the distribution is probably a lot more favorable.
The sperm bank thing was a weird thing to suggest, sorry, but I don't think that it makes sense to put that type of parenthood in the same slot as "stepfather". That's a totally different thing than marrying into some kids.
Jiro
5hr ago
Many of them are still alive and it wouldn't be difficult for the universities to disclaim them or revoke their honorary degrees. And 60 years ago is when they committed their crimes; being accepted by the establishment is more recent.
JarJarJedi
6hr ago
I imagine different states have different definitions of what kinds of murder they prosecute. The point is nobody is (so far) arguing it's not a murder or shouldn't be prosecuted, the question is just some technical points which aren't hard defined one way or another.
I am undecided when it comes to the topic of abortion. On one hand I am thrilled with the idea of killing unborn babies, but on the other hand I am not willing to let women decide anything.
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