I don’t think VDARE is a hate group.
CharlieSheen
Karma: 887
In other news the group X has decided that the most reasonable set of political positions is held by the ideology Y. It just happens to be the ideology that has a ready made and politically viable arguments for more funding to be funnelled to group X.
It might start a session of self-modification by looking for the secret of joy and end (like some Greek sages) deciding that tranquillity is superior to joy. This modification of desire en route to realizing it is easily classified as learning, and deserves our respect. But imagine the case of a machine hoping to make itself less narcissistic and more considerate of the interests of others, but ending by desiring to advance its own ends at the expense of others, even through violence.
It might start a session of self-modification by looking for the secret of something we like and (like a high status group of people) deciding that applause light is superior to something we like. This modification of desire en route to realizing it is easily classified as learning, and deserves our respect. But imagine the case of a machine hoping to make itself less unlikeable and more likeable, but that ends up pursuing unlikeable goals, even through the use of boo lights.
Machines that self-modify can fail at goal preservation, which is a failure if you want to optimize for said goals. No need to import human value judgements, this only confuses the argument for the reader.
The reasons why they might be anti-correlated Thiel explores seem mostly about the US and not some hypothetical country of mostly Libertarian voters. The thing is no such country exists in the world and this is I think no coincidence.
Democracy is like having dinner in a expensive restaurant with a few million people where everyone knows they will be splitting the bill at the end of the evening. The incentives are both on a organizational and individual level messed up and we rationalize our choices afterwards to make them seen less like defecting against other people. If this wasn’t bad enough people for some reason tend to have strong sentiments attaching them to their state of birth, which leaves them open to exploitation by that Eldritch Abomination. Note that I fully agree that “the market” is one too. Then there is the Moldbuggian argument that in a democracy power corrupts the truth finding mechanisms of a society. The map the society uses veers off in all sorts of unpredictable but memetically adaptive ways from the territory. One of the more insidious edits is the doddle at the centre of the map claiming that you are living in a good approximation of a Popperian Open Society.
In short democratic government like many structures built out of humans doesn’t necessarily behave in human friendly ways. We have strong evidence that it is viral and good at waging 19th and 20th century style wars, weak evidence that it is less unfriendly than most structures we have tried in the past and even weaker if any evidence that we can’t come up with something much better.
That’s a tautology. Because they are better places, you call them first world countries.
You are right. I should have said Western Europe, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan are nicer places to live and more free than say Iran, Egypt or Nigeria but the reason probably isn’t democracy.
While redundantly worded I think the original statement still makes sense. Countries that are nicer places to live may tend to be democracies, but they also tend to have higher rates of diabetes. Why do we assume democracy is causing the niceness and not diabetes? This is hyperbole of course, but what if democracy is diabetes human societies get when becoming wealthy or too large?
I have added a source for Peter Thiel’s statement, some of his reasons are also mine.
My previous belief was primarily based on adults telling me as a child that democracy was the mechanism keeping us free. My change of opinion stems in large part for me looking for the appropriate evidence for such a claim and not finding it.
One of the arguments that kept me believing in my early teenage years was that looking around the world one sees “democracies” as better places to live and more free than “non-democracies”. This isn’t powerful evidence at all since we have only a handful of countries in the world that don’t claim to be democracies. The problems of this poor data set are compounded by first world people play a game of no true Scotsman to explain the terrible results democracy brings to many third world countries, often with sentiments not far from:
Genocide in Rwanda? Clearly they weren’t a true democracy yet! A key element was clearly missing.
Note this is a fully general argument against all failure of any political regime or ideology, one that is often use to explain away the atrocities of Communism under Stalin or Mao.
First world countries are much better places to live materially and have more freedom than many third world ones but I don’t see a convincing case that this is due to democracy.
I think they are possible. I’m especially optimistic about the new possibilities opened by advancing technology. Thought talking to Konkvistador has made me think even something as simple as a well thought out monarchy might be better for city-states and small countries with no more than a few million people.
Moldbug is less wrong than most political scientists, many historians and quite a few sociologists.
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
--Peter Thiel, The education of a libertarian
This has been my opinion as well since late 2011.
Thank you for the correction and actual info! I should have made it clearer I was speculating.
I think he came up with his theory first and then found it was basically construal level theory. In any case in the LW/OB social group he is hardly unique when it comes to using quirky terminology for existing stuff.
In this particular instance I fully agree that I am, it is a bit more drama than I expected to be honest. In hindsight the cost did outweigh the benefit.
But again I was just picking this mild example of a very common occurrence on LW. I suppose I could have written this comment out at a different more salient occasion, one where drama was already present, but that would evoke even stronger emotions, meaning my points would be less likely to be addressed.
I also could have also blunted my comments harshness, padding it with text, but that simply isn’t a good way to unambiguously show people that you disapprove and also doesn’t match my writing style.
Right, but the only way I see to keep that preference and still deal with utility monsters is to encourage them to not be utility monsters. Which in practice comes off surprisingly callous.
Rerecording a video has time costs. This discussion was a cost. Also are you missing that the above argument is a big more general than this specific example?
The even more obvious reason is that users who are logging in with multiple accounts will end up voting multiple times on the same comment. This is obviously not good.
I don’t do that, but obviously you only have my word for that. Thank you for elaborating.
Don’t have a problem with this as long as you really are consistent and down vote Clippy, Quirrell, ect. Would be interested in a link to your rationale, which I feel you must have written out somewhere. I mean seriously “Charlie Sheen” I’m surprised you didn’t catch this one of the n other times I’ve said and implied this is an alt to keep my IRL name sort of safe.
If it makes you feel any better I can agree to permanently stop using my main account. What I say with it mostly isn’t as needed as what I say with this one anyway.
Good that is an actual argument instead of just assuming that what 5 or 10% or 20% of the actual viewership will get are offended by standard language use enough for this to be worth spending effort to rerecord the video.
If using gendered pronouns messes with actual rationality, then we should totally do away with them.
If one person insults another, who knows more about how much the insult hurt: the person who delivered it or the person who received it?
“insults another” implies intention here which is a bit of a straw man no? What if they are just offended that I’ve eaten on Sunday? Or used the language like it is normally used. I don’t know maybe we shouldn’t be eating on a Sunday or using the language like it is used but this is then probably political value warfare not “refining rationality”.
Always assuming the “insulted” person is in the right is bad game theory. Even worse if you just assume that the person doing the “insulting” needs to always change when the insulted person is genuine in expressing their hurtness. On human brains such norms mean that exploiter utility monsters will develop rapidly to pump up all the status they can.
“He or she” or “they” seems like the obvious alternative.
Bleh. Using she clearly isn’t neutral. Unless we are going for “boo boys, yay girls” vibe, which is dull. Also is ze really that much of a straw man considering I’ve seen luke and others use it here?
“They” seems appropriate, but LWers are nerds, they have far too little common sense for that. You know that two times out of three if they can be geeks about being “gender neutral” or some progressive silliness they will be.
Your comment suggests you think the discomfort experienced by women from this sort of thing is negligible. It very well may be, but as men I don’t think we’re in a position to know very well without asking women.
The simple truth is that even if we go out of our way to endorse woman friendly norms, they simply won’t be making up half the readership. When doing utility calculus, you need to stop thinking in “half of the intended readership” and just thinking about half the actual readership the thing can get. Lets not kid ourselves that the likely audience split will be 50-50, check out the numbers in the relevant academic philosophy departments or even on LessWrong
I’m suggesting the radical notion that a female reader is as good as a male reader and no more. We ought to be maximizing the readership period, not worrying about its demographics except in a instrumental sense. Now obviously you don’t want to signal that you aren’t inclusive, that is the kind of thing an inbreed toothless bigoted redneck would do, so once someone brings it up you have to do something about it, but 9 times out of 10 that person bringing it up isn’t doing the “audience maximisation” goal any good at all, especially once one factors in the opportunity costs of developer/administrator/writer time!
LessWrong readers are capable of shutting up and calculating, deciding to punch their own father in the face and not talk to him for a year in order to get 500k that can save plenty of lives, but they aren’t willing to give a rough look to people who suggest the building needs 500k in modifications to make it handicapped friendly. I smell a scared cow with some pseudo-utilitarian rationalization lipstick. If they where capable of doing so they would realize that often the discomfort experienced by the minority fraction of readers does not at all outweighs the investment needed to accommodate them. Worse using such efforts conspicuously is a tribal marker away from the acceptable educated crowd norm, lowering the barrier to entry to the wrong contrarian cluster. Same goes for loudly arguing against such accommodations… I think I’m just trying to balance things out, obviously such thinking is really bad in being vulnerable to creating escalating signalling arms races that eat up more and more brain CPU cycles. But tell me who started escalating by stepping away from the Schelling point of default social norms?
Pursuing inclusivity to minor details such as the default use of gender in language has costs and much more importantly opportunity costs people here don’t ever want to talk about. This wasn’t someone complaining that people where putting up a “no handicapped” sign on their front door or being intentionally unwelcoming to women or anything, this was someone expecting that more effort than is the society wide norm be spent on it and assuming this is a cost we have to bare for some reason.
I think it just isn’t worth it.
Come to think of it this drama isn’t worth it either now that the white knight brigade have been alerted, so peace out dudes.
Edit: and dudettes!
Edit: and non-gendered people!
Edit: and non-people!
Down voted for knee jerk downvote. I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about this, this isn’t something that I did on a whim at all. And like I said:
Your comment isn’t by far the worst offender at this kind of utilitarian fail I consistently see. It is not even that bad at it since it hasn’t launched drama. But I have a general policy of down voting all such comments to which I will adhere.
The post itself wasn’t bad, which is why I didn’t down vote it (hint: +1-1 = 0) I just used it to criticize a constant low grade ideological axe people are grinding.
In any case its kind of the point of using Charlie Sheen to say stuff that will get me down voted but I think need to be said.
Wikipedia definition: