I might have confused this post with another of his, he actually did an ok job here.
The “mechanized mass murder” and the call to action to stop paying for the “murder of more animals” do make the article seem much less serious and a bit confused.
Killing millions of animals is a positive that people are happy to pay for so they can eat those animals.
Torturing those same animals makes people unconfortabke
After reading most of Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature (will finish the last hundred pages at some point), my views on this topic are softened.
Pinker depicts humanity as primitively highly inclined to violence, with norms and culture throughout our lives working to suppress our tendency to violence, civilize us, and bring us to internalize that violence is inappropriate.
While the correct, mature view for civilization could eventually be to have violent punishments as part of the tools in order, having norms of violence may strip us of our cultivated abhorrence of violence which stops us from living like cavemen.
When being good or bad is binary, perfect rational citizens unless crime suits them, consistent visceral punishment makes more sense.
When you have a constant mob for a civilization, with the occasional rioter, making violence explicitly legitimate might be a bad idea.
The point isn’t the rioters—the point is how the mob acts
So the $1 → 10 years is based on estimates for historical funding of advocates vs impact of those advocates?
Seems nice but not sure about the marginal use.
Your article generally seems confused/hysterical when it comes to eating meat, which weakens the vibe for factory farming.
This is unfortunately common, people who care about factory farming enough to make it an issue are also against earing meat period, and it simply confuses the issue.
Same as the crusade against meat for health reasons, infested with moral-based vegans and vegetarians who are clearly not unbiased
Dojo storming. Tournaments.
Essentially ritualistic exposure to the outside world, with different norms from internal interaction
The norm is you should give each person the treatment they deserve based on the social norms. A high status person treating a lower status person with less respect than is appropriate is exactly the same, except they can often get away with it due to might makes right.
Similarly, stealing from rich people is pretty similar to stealing from poor people, and the fact that rich people will be protected from thieves -with violence if necessary—is a feature not a bug.
That thieves don’t respect property rights does not make the rich protecting themselves with armed guards “might makes right”.
Higher status individual is socially decided, communication doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
If you wish to not treat them as higher status that’s leaving the social default.
You can call this “might” but in fact it’s attempting to change the default context (according to society) to lower the other person’s position.
Good analysis of the dynamic the original quote is discussing. The authority figure is expecting ‘respect appropriate to their station’ and will give in return ‘respect appropriate to the other’s station’.
The non-authority expects to be able to reject the authority’s framework of respect and unilaterally decide on a new one.
The authority, quite naturually, does not take the lower status individual as their authority figure on the meta respect structure.
Unless the meta respect structure of multiple disconnected layers is imposed societally by high status decouplers (as most people are not much for decoupling, and decoupling is probably bad for your status a lot of the time), the authority figure is correct and the low status individual is wrong. Status is mostly bundled, respectful behaviour follows status and is mostly bundled, and demanding a higher status individual lower themselves to their status behaviourally by accepting the low status individual as an authority (or higher status) conceptually is highly disrespectful of not only the hierarchy but the individual as well
Hanson writes about birds that give up food and take guard duty for prestige.
I mostly use it for syntax, and formatting/modifying docs, giving me quick visual designs...
Eris thwarts Moloch
Not sure how many very mentally impaired people you’ve spent time with. Chimpanzees are not the same as mentally impaired humans. At all.
Wizard power well-directed can do amazing things.
Most wizards (1)do not develop particularly strong powers, (2) the powers they develop are often pretty useless at society level, and (3) on their own usually don’t use those powers very efficiently, and (4) most (?) wizards do not naturally work well together without direction.
King power is pretty similar, but :
you naturally get higher levels of power than in wizards, but you can only have so many people with so much king-power (based on number of people and available resources);
(2) does not apply much (once you get past a certain level of power being a bully to your own family is pretty irrelevant) directionally, but as with (3) there is a subset of skills for actually being a good manager/executive which are less incentivized
(3) is exacerbated, as the way to gain more power is often different from being effecient, especially for society
(4) is mitigated, except when working together well is sub-optimal for gaining power
One of the major issues for humanity in building something like this is king-power players developing and using the wizardry of getting things done, organizational rot and weakness are a massive issue in society
The words you’re looking (perhaps): power, influence
Not sure why the holocaust is relevant.
60 IQ humans are defective, generally incapable of taking care of themselves, are unproductive and without a lot of effort by others have bad lives.
Of course we’d rather new humans be 100 IQ rather than 60 IQ. Even so, it’s generally accepted that killing them, forcefully sterilizing (at least those who are aware) is immoral. Which means that despite incentives the majority population treats them as members of the same race and morally relevant.
(Contrast with current humanity—people are useful and can produce more than they eat, so there’s no incentive to get rid of them. Further, you only need more selection for improvement, no sterilization necessary)
This new subpopulation would be much smaller than the 140+IQ group (I doubt we’re getting 2 million 200IQ+ people very quickly), and also 140IQ people aren’t interested in killing off everyone else...
If this new population wants to agitate for making new humans with high IQs I don’t see that as a threat.
Eugenics for memes seems closer to sci-fi right now and unless done really stupidly seems irrelevant
USA wins on the merits of historically preferring to pretend it isn’t ruling the world and mostly letting other countries do their thing, even when it has extreme military dominance (nukes)
China seems to be better at governance
On values USA is more adapted to wealth, while China has the communistic underpinnings which may be very good in a fully-automated economy.
Comes down to whether you want the easygoing less competent (and slightly psychotic) overlords or the more competent higher-strung control freaks I suppose.
When you say ~zero value, do you mean hyperbolically dicounted or something more extreme?
I don’t remeber who said it, but building AI isn’t just about power dynamics or a bit of efficiency.
It’s about whether humanity should keep doing things.
Civilization (feels like it?) stagnated and degraded for the last decades (the main technological upgrade being the cause of social degradation).
We haven’t solved cancer, can’t regrow limbs, people are unhealthy, commuting to work is unpleasant and work weeks are long. The list can go on.
Humans make tools do let them do better and more work. Humans even set up full automation of certain things. Now humans are looking to fully automate humans, perhaps because we don’t believe in the human race. (I think EY and doomers generally are the same as the accelerationists, neither has faith in humanity).
What could humans make that would restore faith- faith that we could compete with AGIs, faith that we can get out of stagnation without replacing humans, faith that we can make the world of humans a better one?
A tech advance, an organizational efficiency advance, quality of life, something else?
Just make online courses for all major studies, with pdf textbooks, video lectures and homework exercises with solutions. Then set up a testing facility and give people degrees based on passed tests.
Pay the best professors you can for this, make tests with very high upper ceilings, it could become the standardized system for schooling like China’s old civil bureaucracy tests.
(For tests you could have full day tests, and you answer as many questions as you can—with the later ones more difficult)
Leave the “top schools” to their status games, provide better education and fairly standardized testing, plus certification—for much lower prices
Not romantic, fun, sexy, etc to just ask. Much better when it’s as close to a dance as possible, as much subtley as can be expected is involved.
This is certainly a filter, but not consciously. Consiously this allows the woman to feel good about herself and the whole interaction.
(Not that being straightforward is bad or can’t be exciting—though it is usually flatter)
You’re confusing popular sentiment with actual differences in looks. There are very large differences between good looking and the best looking people, though clothes and makeup can close the gaps