I was tempted to give Siam as a successful example instead, if only because they managed to never be colonized,
The reason Siam was never colonized was that it served as a buffer state between British Burma and French Indo-China. This suggests another method to avoid colonization. Play rival would-be colonizers against each other.
Kinda like the US experience in Afghanistan
The difference is that the US attempted to establish democracy, i.e., hand over power to the locals as quickly as possible, I believe Daniel’s plan would avoid this.
(and the Russian experience there before, and the British experience there before that...)
The problem both the Russians and British had was interference by rival powers, the US and Russia respectively. The Russians also had the problem that the economic system they wanted to impose being dysfunctional.
But also, there’s a large difference between being targeted for economic subjugation only (as Japan was) and being targeted for territorial control (as in, imperial subject moving onto your land en masse), as the native Americans, native Australians, and Maori were.
Part of the reason Japan wasn’t targeted for territorial control is that it was clear to everyone that Japan would be able to resist.
I don’t know enough about Native Americans to say exactly how I’d go about the equivalent of a Meiji Restoration, but that’s what I would attempt.
Then Japanese were much more similar to the Europeans then Native Americans. For starters they had a government. Furthermore, they had developed some institutions that were similar to western institutions, or at least more similar than anything else outside the West.
I’d pass laws mandating compulsory Westernisation,
First you’d need to create a bureaucracy capable of enforcing laws.
It’s possible to continue a conversation with someone who’s every statement is laced with “nigga” but it takes effort. And no one is obligated to expend their energy on having a conversation with me
Conversely, it also take effort to carry on a conversation when you’re constantly trying to avoid saying “um”.
It can be worth it to pause and reconsider your language even if the offensiveness of a word or idea is exactly the subject of your dispute. When I hosted a debate on “R: Fire Eich” one of the early speakers made it clear that, in his opinion, opposing gay marriage was logically equivalent to endorsing gay genocide (he invoked a slippery slope argument back to the dark days of criminal indifference to AIDS).
This is not just about the same word having different meanings. His feeling contains an implicit substantive claim about slippery slopes (not to mention a false narrative of the early history of AIDS).
I don’t think justice fits well under compassion
Thinking about this people making this mistake explains a lot of bad thinking these days. In particular, “social justice” looks a lot like what you get by trying to shoehorn justice under compassion.
So to use my former example of the Great Filter Hypothesis: sure, it makes predictions, sure, we can assign probabilities, sure, we can do updates. But nothing about the Great Filter Hypothesis is constructive or causal, nothing about it tells us what to expect the Filter to do or how it actually works. Which means it’s not actually telling us much at all, as far as I can say.
Yes it is causal in the same sense that mathematics of physical laws are causal.
In relation to Overcoming Bias, I’ve ranted on similarly about explaining all possible human behaviors in terms of signalling, status, wealth, and power. Paging /u/Quirinus_Quirrell… If they see a man flirting with a woman at a party, Quirrell and Hanson will seem to explain it in terms of signalling and status, while I will deftly and neatly predict that the man wants to have sex with the woman.
You do realize the two explanations aren’t contradictory and are in fact mutually reinforcing? In particular, the man wants to have sex with here and is engaging in status signalling games to accomplish his goal. Also his reasons for wanting to have sex with her may also include signaling and status.
Well, with your modifications these map pretty clearly to six of the seven Christian virtues, the missing one being Hope.
Thanks.
You might have problems reproducing his upbringing. ;)
The more damage you want to do the longer it takes.
Would having control of a massive number of computers for a few minutes be enough?
Definitely not. To give you a sense of scale, a new bitcoin block comes out every five minutes and it would take control of the block chain for multiple ‘ticks’ to do serious damage.
always check their numbers. Con artists always get the math wrong.
I also feel the same way, but in my experience most people don’t.
Also as RobinZ pointed out here things get fuzzy in the limit where one has to taboo “government”.
I’m sorry, are you aware of the reasons why I think what I do?
Yes, you’re part of a movement that believes lying is justified for their cause and as a result have started to believe their own lies.
I think it’s more that the things Arthur is responding to are, in fact, very racist.
Care to taboo what you mean by “racist”. In particular is it “racist” to believe that traits like intelligence correlate with where someone’s ancestors came from? Does it matter if there is evidence for the belief in question? Does it matter if the belief is true?
Also why is “racism” so uniquely awful. If you look at the history of the 20th century far more people have been killed in the name of egalitarian ideologies (specifically communism) then in the name of ideologies generally considered “racist”.
When discussing existing oppressive social structures such as patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism,
Taboo “opressive”. Judging by how your calling capitalism oppressive it appears that improving the living standard of most of the world is “oppression”. If so we could probably use more of it.
In other words, if a fight is important to you, fight nasty. If that means lying, lie.
If you find yourself needing to lie for your cause, what your effectively admitting is that the truth doesn’t support it. You may want to consider updating on that fact when deciding whether you should really be supporting said cause.
Also as I explain here Yvain’s reason for not lying for your cause is not the best one he could give. The biggest problem is that it will fill your cause with people who believe said lies.
If issue Z is highly important to you and you vote on the basis of the party’s attitude to it, how does the party know this if the only thing you do is silently drop your ballot?
Vote for a third party that cares about Z.
Politics is the mind-killer. Surely such a fact-checking site would be prone to all the hacks politics can master to ″limit″ its effect.
Not to mention the fact-checkers themselves are subject to being mind-killed.
Darwin apparently originated the concept of lumpers and splitters. Both lumping and splitting are enormously useful for thinking about reality — and it’s even more useful to understand that you can do either depending upon the circumstances and your needs — but as the Troublesome Inheritance brouhaha shows a lot of people who think they are really smart can’t handle F. Scott Fitzgerald’s challenge of holding two ideas at once (e.g., lumping and splitting) and still function.
In general, Wade’s critics have a hard time dealing with complexity (in other words, they aren’t as smart as they think they are). Chuck deals extremely well with complexity (i.e., he’s really smart).
In order to have a useful conversation about the topic it will be necessary to challenge his implicit claim. If he insists on making that impossible then its not possible to have a reasonable conversation with him.