domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
BahRamYou
7m ago
But doesnt that require you to have some special insight about elections? I agree with nate silver, this election is too close to call and i have no idea what will happen. I certainly wouldn't want to wager millions of dollars on it. If you have some special insight, you could probably becone a celebrity forecaster like nate silver and make more that way.
Lost
43m ago
Yeah this is a fairly accurate take, although I also made a good amount of money (nowhere near your bankroll, natch) betting on Trump in '16 when his odds were extremely undervalued, both in the primary and the general, up until the last couple months
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
44m ago
If a M100 works, you didn't need a gaming mouse to begin with, just one that works at all. `
TowardsPanna
53m ago
May I ask what gives you confidence on where crypto is headed? What sort of bets did you make?
sapph
1hr ago
The crypto election markets (ie polymarket) dont have those problems. You can bet millions without changing the odds too much (assuming you spread your bets out a little). Spread and withdrawal fees are very small. You are probably thinking of the situation with predictit which did have all those issues.
Note: I specifically do mean election markets. Elections, especially presidential elections, have by far the most liquidity. But you can bet tens or low hundreds of thousands of dollars on all sorts of markets. Liquidity varies but many markets have decent liquidity.
Stellula
1hr ago
Maybe it was like he had said he read moldbug then or something?
It was a long time ago when he was announced that this was being talked about. It was surprising how much overlap he had with the sort of people poasters here like.
cjet79
1hr ago
Yeah all of them announced completion of their vaccine literally the day after the election.
And it'd be better to begin geoengineering now than to wait 20 years, wouldn't it?
Not really. Depends on the discount rate and the cheapness of various solutions. Basically do the geo-engineering when it makes sense from a cost benefit perspective.
BahRamYou
1hr ago
that's impressive. are you actively trading crypto, or just HODLing it? It seems hard to make large amounts on prediction markets, no matter how good you are, because they're just too thinly traded and have too much of a spread/withdrawal fees.
cjet79
1hr ago
I originally had something in my post about negotiating with terrorists.
I didn't want to be confused about calling the dems terrorists. But there is somethign to the US policy of "no negotiating with terrorists". If someone threatens you with violence or defecting, it makes sense to no longer negotiate with that person. Basically once that is on the table there is no guaranteed off-ramp except more violence.
If the democrats are willing to hold the government hostage, then there really isn't much room to negotiate with them. The only winning move is not to play.
Grant_us_eyes
1hr ago
As weird as this demented chimera of a forum is, I'm reasonably certain that we really don't have any major movers and shakers in the national political realm.
Reasonably certain.
...then again, on the off chance that I'm wrong, can we, make a wish list, or something? I've got a particular bone to grind with the EPA in regards to emission standards, and as it stands, purchasing a reasonably priced Toyota Hilux is about as likely as winning the lottery by this point...
Felagund
1hr ago
Are you in Wisconsin? That's the only one that had that list match exactly. It looks like their only write-in candidate available is Peter Sonski, of the American Solidarity Party.
I imagine De la Cruz is too extreme with you, wanting to abolish capitalism. I couldn't find identifiable policies for Terry.
If by "quantitative approaches to existential threats" you mean, not shutting down everything over climate change, while still caring about it, I imagine that rules out West and Stein. They're also just generally more extreme.
Of the remaining:
Oliver likes to handle things by just having the government leave the matter. He wants to let everyone in on immigration. He wants to help the climate only by stopping government actions that make things worse.
Trump's probably more anti-trade than you'd like, and cares less about the environment than you'd prefer (though he agrees that clean air and water are important).
RFK's now only listing things that he can agree with Trump on, which makes him hard for me to evaluate.
Sonski's not really a YIMBY, and wants to keep allowing in refugees.
I'd say, if you want to choose someone with a chance, definitely go Trump. Otherwise, your closest match is probably one of those last four, but I'm not sure which.
Ditto6687
1hr ago
I remember moldbug saying he will not come on Twitter, did he change his mind?
TequilaMockingbird
2hr ago
Jason and Kylie Kelce are the superior Kelces, change my view ;-)
NewCharlesInCharge
2hr ago
Make the thief, if convicted, liable for the lost wages. If they can't pay, have the state front the money and charge the prevailing interest rate to the thief. If they malinger once out of prison, impress them and make them work it off laboring for the state.
TIRM
2hr ago
Neocons are bad conservatives. Good riddance to that lot of big government military adventuring. Disaffected leftists turning bad and ruining Republicans.
TIRM
2hr ago
I don't like bureaucrats and I obviously didn't vote for them. These self-appointed vetoers should be fired and criminally punished if I had my way. They derive all their authority from the executive. In a better world they would be suitably punished for betraying that. They also almost all happen to be partisan Democrats very selectively deciding which sorts of policies to obstruct.
TIRM
2hr ago
Trump is a vote for restoring norms.
But will be countered by:
People blew it up in an attempt to oppose him.
They'll go as far as possible to oppose him next time. They're whipping themselves into a frenzy about how this is the last election, etc. Someone on redd told me the military would kill them if Trump wins.
The actual leaders of the Democratic party are not that hysterical redditor. But they'll be plenty Trump deranged in their own way. Blowing up any and all norms or guardrails will be routine in their Quixotic struggle against him.
NewCharlesInCharge
2hr ago
On the podcast Vance says that Trump got excited about how cool it would be to suddenly announce Vance as the VP pick in Butler, and then was talked down from it.
So Vance probably had a feeling of already narrowly missing death that day.
Man_in_White
2hr ago
Though he usually expects a real name with the comments.
Not sure where you getting this, plenty of people use nicknames and he quotes them in highlights
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2hr ago
Although you aren't technically replying to me, I feel obliged to note yet again that Is =/= Ought. I have no clue why I keep having to spell this out, and in Rat spaces no less.
I am saying that SJ is, probabilistically, less of a problem because there's a fair chance nuclear war gets rid of it rendering most efforts to fight it moot. I am not saying that mass casualties from nuclear war are good because of this. The past couple of election cycles I've been begging all the parties to do anything about civil defence; I'd have been willing to vote for the [i]Greens[/i] if they'd had word one about this.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2hr ago
Thank you for taking the time to reply, I really do appreciate it.
I think this is an instance of the Motte of a Motte-and-Bailey that is commonly deployed in defense of every academic discipline that operates according to "humanities rules". Motte: "This is just a bunch of guys shooting the shit. Sometimes they even produce interesting things that I personally enjoy. Why do you, an outsider who doesn't even appreciate any of this, barge in and try to impose rules such as your 'epistemic standards'?"
Sorry if I didn't emphasize this enough, but I did say that you had to evaluate every work on a case by case basis. What I meant that "guys shooting the shit" is a helpful way to approach some continental works. I don't think it's the best way to approach all continental works. Derrida's Voice and Phenomenon lays out some claims and arguments in the philosophy of mind that, I think, can be phrased in simple and accessible terms. Foucault's Discipline and Punish is a pretty down to earth history of the development of the western prison system over the last several centuries. They're just, like, normal books. Nothing too mysterious going on.
I do think that Lacan goes off the reservation sometimes, to the point that the commentaries and secondary sources on his work are sometimes better than the original works themselves. But that doesn't mean that everything he wrote is bad, and it certainly doesn't mean that every work of continental philosophy is bad.
Bailey: "These people are the world authorities on philosophy. We pay them to do philosophy and all philosophers agree that they are the most influential and insightful philosophers, so we should defer to them in matters of philosophy."
"Deference" to an "authority" is a concept that's about as antithetical to philosophy as you can get. For every single claim in the history of philosophy, you can find examples of someone asserting the opposite; for every canonical philosopher, you can find another canonical philosopher who thought the first guy was an idiot. Even if you were to just focus on continental philosophy alone, I really can't emphasize enough just how fragmented it is. Philosophy just is debate and disagreement, in a way that no other field is. I mean it when I say that if you walk into an English department (which is where continental philosophers usually hang out in the US) you can find people who think that Lacan was bullshit and evil, Sartre was bullshit and evil, Derrida was bullshit and evil... who is the authority to defer to? No one would be able to agree!
Analytic philosophers I think are quite scrupulous about this, to a fault. Because of continental philosophy's greater focus on specific figures rather than isolated positions and arguments, it's more common to get people who are "fans" of one figure or another, and I acknowledge that sometimes it looks like they're treating them as an authority figure. Although I don't think that's really what's going on usually. When someone says "Marx said X" for example, it should be read as more like "X is a claim that was developed in Marx's work, so you should refer to his works if you want further justification for it" or "I believe X is true, but I didn't come up with it, Marx did", rather than "you should believe X because Marx said so". More like citing your sources, rather than an assertion of authority. Even if someone did start treating their favorite philosopher like an authority figure, they wouldn't be able to do so without major cognitive dissonance, for all the reasons mentioned above; they'd have to explain why there are a lot of other philosophers who think their favorite "authority" was wrong about everything.
I can't personally vet the psychology of everyone who talks about philosophy. Maybe there are some people who really do believe "X is true because Y said so". But, that doesn't reveal anything in particular about philosophy itself. That just reveals that that particular person is dumb and wrong. It would be like saying that data fabrication is a part of science because some scientists have fabricated data before.
As a result, there are Lacanians and Deleuzians sitting in IRBs and ethics boards and asking to be persuaded, in their terms, before I am allowed to use my funding to perform scientific experiments
I would be legitimately fascinated and highly interested if you could provide specific examples of that happening.
we defer to them in questions of what arguments are acceptable in politics and school; and ultimately they are what anchors the chains of trust and authority that we use to determine which political movements are legitimate (at risk of pulling clichés from the bingo board, the argument that the druggie who runs off with five pairs of sneakers as he torches the store is misguided but has his heart in the right place ultimately leads back, via many chains of simplification for political expediency, to some humanities tract full of "poetic language") and which ones are to be treated as threats.
I think you're overestimating the real world impact of academic philosophy here. I think it would be kinda neat if it actually did have that level of impact. But I don't think it does.
I believe (and please correct me if I'm wrong; I'm not trying to put words into your mouth) that you see a direct causal link between continental philosophy on one hand and contemporary wokeness on the other. It's a claim that I've seen repeated in various forms on TheMotte on multiple occasions, and I've always disagreed with it, for 3 main reasons:
-
Broadly speaking, I don't think that people hold the political positions they do because they read a book, or even because they talked to someone who read a book. I think people believe the things they do because they want certain things (wealth, power, various types of freedom, etc). The desire and the need for something concrete comes first, and then they look for an ideology later to justify it. So, for example, I don't think that DEI exists in the US today because of humanities academics. I think it exists because that's naturally the sort of thing that arises when you have an ascendant coalition of racial minorities and a demographically declining racial majority.
-
The "big names" of continental philosophy are not particularly woke (there's little in their work that would be recognizable as modern wokeness, anyway) and in fact I think there are resources in their work that could be a benefit to anti-wokeness.
-
Regarding the point about obscurantist language - do you think that's somehow necessary to leftist politics? If they were forced to only use simple words then the whole thing would collapse? Because I think that's clearly not true. You can easily put all the key tenets and arguments of wokeness into simple language. To reiterate the point above, woke people are woke because of the intrinsic content of the positions, not because they were hypnotized by a humanities tract.
Lost
3hr ago
Neoconservatives are not and were not ever conservative. Their origin was in the Democratic party, in many cases as Socialists, who saw an opportunity to take over the foreign politics of the Republican party when they lost a struggle session to New Left Great Society culture leftists. This would be like if the Chapo guys defected with Anna Khachiyan to the right because they had some weird fascination with Eastern Europe and the Balkans and in 60 years you called them conservatives when they defected back to the left to ensure the (D) candidate doesnt stab Bulgaria in the back
nor do I believe that there is any meaningful number of progressives in positions of power who believe in executing people for expressing conservative opinions.
True but if once we got to the point where we decided as a society "we should start just liquidating inconvenient people again" it might not be entirely clear where that stopped or who would be designated disposable under that paradigm. I am just as I said playing devils advocate here, I think if we got to the point where we were just executing either thieves or conservatives society would have gone pretty far off the rails albeit in radically different directions in those two cases.
Please stop saying this.
More options
Context Copy link