Neologismology

To be expected from libertarians that they're more tolerant of conservatives, cops, and fascists than progressives.

Wtf, Srinivasan is obviously just a white supremacist, classic dogwhistles

It's an Indian name. No colour has any monopoly on fascism.

To connect this to the conversation I was just having...Balaji Srinivasan is Scott Alexander, as imagined by people who fucking hate Scott Alexander. A high-IQ idiot with deeply stupid and evil political views, wrapping those views in the aesthetics of technology to hide their actual content.

Recently I got two books that had strong recommendations from Bill Gates and like... idk. I like reading all these pop-level nonfiction books but I don't regard it as serious? like it's a form of entertainment. That's why I'm always posting about whatever I'm on about and it's kind of interchangeable whether it's some fantasy series I'm reading or some nonfiction book. So... when i see bill gates saying this is an important book... idk. It makes me think of Scott Alexander. Like, he wrote a review of The Secret of Our Success, and said (correctly) that one of the most interesting claims is the story about manioc. But that story is false in all the essentials, you can determine this just by reading the book's own sources. Like we're not talking about the science being mistaken: the scholarly literature, what I'll call the "serious" sources, has the information, and the book for the general public is just wrong. In my experience this is really common. And the stuff that's straight up wrong is just the tip of the iceberg of the more general stuff you can't understand properly from this level of exposition. Not always because it can't be presented in a way understandable to the general public, but it just isn't, which makes a lot more sense to me after reading that @eightyonekilograms linked 的 post about the publishing industry. I think when I was pointing out a mistake in a book I was reading about dyes someone asked me why don't you write your own pop science book about dyes but with those statistics in hand I'm definitely not going to. So now that I've made this analogy between Bill Gates and Scott Alexander, I'm thinking, what if the world is run by people a lot like Scott Alexander? I mean, that kind of person at best. Smart people with an intellectually demanding job who mostly pick up other subjects through pop level expositions. It's actually kind of a scary thought.

How else could the powerful learn about other subjects?

Even a NEET doesn't have the time / energy to study everything properly. Someone who works a job that would require a thousand hours of work each day to do right definitely doesn't.

study with textbooks like the ones used in college classes

They absolutely do not have the time.

Reading a pop-level nonfiction book doesn't give you as much understanding of a subject as the equivalent number of hours studying a textbook would. It's just more fun. As Robin Hanson says, "never confuse leisure that makes you sweat with work."

I know. Why are you telling me this?

Nobody has ever understood the world, and nobody ever will. The powerful, who influence so many different things, will never have more than a dilettante's grasp of their own impact. That's true when they read pop science, and it would still be true if they read textbook chapters.

You mentioned Scott in the OP. He reads the "good" stuff sometimes, even outside his field. He remains what he is.

I don't see why people can read pop books but can't read a textbook. If you have time to read, then you have time to read. What you read doesn't matter. If you choose to read crap and speak based on that crap, then you're willingly believing crap as if it's real. That's a choice. You can choose to just not do that. It does take more time to do it right, but you can either spew bullshit and lies or delude yourself that you're "smart". It's not a hard choice. People just choose to lie about it. I'm certainly not going around claiming I'm a doctor because I read some bullshit aromatherapy pop books.

You can't read enough textbooks to actually inform yourself fully. A better media diet might make you a relatively well-informed dilettante, but you'll still be a dilettante.

I'm not saying don't do it, but I am saying that it won't let you escape the problem described in the OP.

Recently I got two books that had strong recommendations from Bill Gates and like... idk. I like reading all these pop-level nonfiction books but I don't regard it as serious? like it's a form of entertainment. That's why I'm always posting about whatever I'm on about and it's kind of interchangeable whether it's some fantasy series I'm reading or some nonfiction book. So... when i see bill gates saying this is an important book... idk. It makes me think of Scott Alexander. Like, he wrote a review of The Secret of Our Success, and said (correctly) that one of the most interesting claims is the story about manioc. But that story is false in all the essentials, you can determine this just by reading the book's own sources. Like we're not talking about the science being mistaken: the scholarly literature, what I'll call the "serious" sources, has the information, and the book for the general public is just wrong. In my experience this is really common. And the stuff that's straight up wrong is just the tip of the iceberg of the more general stuff you can't understand properly from this level of exposition. Not always because it can't be presented in a way understandable to the general public, but it just isn't, which makes a lot more sense to me after reading that @eightyonekilograms linked 的 post about the publishing industry. I think when I was pointing out a mistake in a book I was reading about dyes someone asked me why don't you write your own pop science book about dyes but with those statistics in hand I'm definitely not going to. So now that I've made this analogy between Bill Gates and Scott Alexander, I'm thinking, what if the world is run by people a lot like Scott Alexander? I mean, that kind of person at best. Smart people with an intellectually demanding job who mostly pick up other subjects through pop level expositions. It's actually kind of a scary thought.

How else could the powerful learn about other subjects?

Even a NEET doesn't have the time / energy to study everything properly. Someone who works a job that would require a thousand hours of work each day to do right definitely doesn't.

study with textbooks like the ones used in college classes

They absolutely do not have the time.

Reading a pop-level nonfiction book doesn't give you as much understanding of a subject as the equivalent number of hours studying a textbook would. It's just more fun. As Robin Hanson says, "never confuse leisure that makes you sweat with work."

I know. Why are you telling me this?

Nobody has ever understood the world, and nobody ever will. The powerful, who influence so many different things, will never have more than a dilettante's grasp of their own impact. That's true when they read pop science, and it would still be true if they read textbook chapters.

You mentioned Scott in the OP. He reads the "good" stuff sometimes, even outside his field. He remains what he is.

Recently I got two books that had strong recommendations from Bill Gates and like... idk. I like reading all these pop-level nonfiction books but I don't regard it as serious? like it's a form of entertainment. That's why I'm always posting about whatever I'm on about and it's kind of interchangeable whether it's some fantasy series I'm reading or some nonfiction book. So... when i see bill gates saying this is an important book... idk. It makes me think of Scott Alexander. Like, he wrote a review of The Secret of Our Success, and said (correctly) that one of the most interesting claims is the story about manioc. But that story is false in all the essentials, you can determine this just by reading the book's own sources. Like we're not talking about the science being mistaken: the scholarly literature, what I'll call the "serious" sources, has the information, and the book for the general public is just wrong. In my experience this is really common. And the stuff that's straight up wrong is just the tip of the iceberg of the more general stuff you can't understand properly from this level of exposition. Not always because it can't be presented in a way understandable to the general public, but it just isn't, which makes a lot more sense to me after reading that @eightyonekilograms linked 的 post about the publishing industry. I think when I was pointing out a mistake in a book I was reading about dyes someone asked me why don't you write your own pop science book about dyes but with those statistics in hand I'm definitely not going to. So now that I've made this analogy between Bill Gates and Scott Alexander, I'm thinking, what if the world is run by people a lot like Scott Alexander? I mean, that kind of person at best. Smart people with an intellectually demanding job who mostly pick up other subjects through pop level expositions. It's actually kind of a scary thought.

How else could the powerful learn about other subjects?

Even a NEET doesn't have the time / energy to study everything properly. Someone who works a job that would require a thousand hours of work each day to do right definitely doesn't.

study with textbooks like the ones used in college classes

They absolutely do not have the time.

Recently I got two books that had strong recommendations from Bill Gates and like... idk. I like reading all these pop-level nonfiction books but I don't regard it as serious? like it's a form of entertainment. That's why I'm always posting about whatever I'm on about and it's kind of interchangeable whether it's some fantasy series I'm reading or some nonfiction book. So... when i see bill gates saying this is an important book... idk. It makes me think of Scott Alexander. Like, he wrote a review of The Secret of Our Success, and said (correctly) that one of the most interesting claims is the story about manioc. But that story is false in all the essentials, you can determine this just by reading the book's own sources. Like we're not talking about the science being mistaken: the scholarly literature, what I'll call the "serious" sources, has the information, and the book for the general public is just wrong. In my experience this is really common. And the stuff that's straight up wrong is just the tip of the iceberg of the more general stuff you can't understand properly from this level of exposition. Not always because it can't be presented in a way understandable to the general public, but it just isn't, which makes a lot more sense to me after reading that @eightyonekilograms linked 的 post about the publishing industry. I think when I was pointing out a mistake in a book I was reading about dyes someone asked me why don't you write your own pop science book about dyes but with those statistics in hand I'm definitely not going to. So now that I've made this analogy between Bill Gates and Scott Alexander, I'm thinking, what if the world is run by people a lot like Scott Alexander? I mean, that kind of person at best. Smart people with an intellectually demanding job who mostly pick up other subjects through pop level expositions. It's actually kind of a scary thought.

How else could the powerful learn about other subjects?

Even a NEET doesn't have the time / energy to study everything properly. Someone who works a job that would require a thousand hours of work each day to do right definitely doesn't.

It's kind of esoterically funny to me that a) there's a fairly popular in, uh, Certain Circles pop-sociology thesis that the rise of capitalism in Europe is in some occult way downstream of the Catholic ban on incest and also b) the Most Catholic Family in History was also famously so dedicated to inbreeding they kept at it even when infant mortality rates for Habsburg heirs were like 80%.

Is this about the whole "cousin marriages keeping clans excessively tight-knit" thing?

Given the type of shit they try to pass off as ‘upgrades,’ I think it’s good to delete everything past ‘illegal’ in that sentence

This will sound like a rhetorical question, but I really do want to know the answer. Where do you think people who don't own houses should live?

I'd like to see progressively increasing restrictions on residential leases (e.g. stricter limits or bans on evictions and rent increases, stronger habitabilty criteria, amnesty for rent debtors, caps on investment volume, etc.) with the aim of decreasing property values and making private residential landlordism uneconomical, combined with a massive expropriation and improvement campaign to expand the stock of public and non-profit housing. The aim would be a system like Vienna or Singapore where higher-income renters pay above cost to subsidize rent for lower-income renters as well as capital investments.

But I am open to other approaches to the decommodification of housing

Might work. Vienna and Singapore seem to have this stuff figured out. Still, I'm uncomfortable with expropriation. And that approach to lawmaking has a nasty tendency to backfire; the track record of rent control isn't inspiring.

From my point of view, the absolute most important thing is to get supply above demand. If there's a shortage of housing, landlords are kings; if there's a shortage of renters, they're beggars.

Free market probably wouldn't build that much housing even if we let it. So a massive public housing construction project is probably necessary.

And I think a simple public announcement could accomplish a lot. Investing is all about predicting the future; how much do you think Trudeau could drop property values with a single speech saying "I intend to destroy property values and send the housing market into freefall; this would be a good time to panic sell"?

But I guess it's all moot, because we aren't even letting the free market build as much as it wants to. Our government has made very clear that it wants to keep property values high and property "investments" profitable.

We obviously don't have the political will for your fairly radical proposals, or even for my more moderate ones, since we're currently actively working to make the problem worse. If we can't force ourselves to stop doing that, well...

The whole thing feels a bit hopeless, to be honest.

Being able to walk to places with my friends/partners regularly would be nice...

I keep hearing about how curing disability is supposed to be problematic but I am pretty sure my life would be a lot better if I could walk a normal amount and not be in pain all the time and had the energy and mental clarity to do more of the things I enjoy doing.

Well, there's "disabilities" and there's "disabilities".

There aren't many who would object to curing chronic pain. "Curing" autism would be a lot more controversial, and for good reason.

The fact that we use the same word for hundreds of entirely separate circumstances leads to some woolly thinking, I think.

PS: Deafness is legitimately curable in many cases, and it's controversial in the deaf community. An author I like was once publicly spat on for having cochlear implants.

Given the type of shit they try to pass off as ‘upgrades,’ I think it’s good to delete everything past ‘illegal’ in that sentence

This will sound like a rhetorical question, but I really do want to know the answer. Where do you think people who don't own houses should live?

I have the following Grand Theory of the Twenty-First Century that I would like to put forth. I don't know if it's true, but sometimes I think it's true.

Many of you will have heard of the Flynn effect. This is the observed effect that average performance on IQ tests has gone up since these tests started being administered. On a first glance, it appears that people all over the world have gotten measurably smarter in the past 100 years.

There are a variety of proposed explanations for this. Probably better childhood nutrition and the like has something to do with it. But another proposed explanation is this: IQ tests are known to be trainable. You can practice and get better at them. And you can practice the sorts of tasks that show up on an IQ and get better at those sorts of tasks, which might be why (IIRC?) standardized education seems to improve IQ scores. What sorts of tasks are on an IQ test? Abstract thinking tasks. Tasks related to abstract pattern recognition.

It has been proposed that people today live their lives in a world much more governed by these sorts of abstract tasks. We interface with bureaucracy and paperwork, we manipulate strange little symbols on a computer screen, we internalize the various abstractions we are (explicitly and implicitly) taught in school in order to receive the best grade. Where children 100 years ago were taught by their environment to do physical, concrete things, children today are taught by their environment to engage with abstract systems. And success at engagement with abstract systems is what determines success in life, which was much less true 100 years ago.

There are ways in which I think this is a good thing. Abstract systems have both many uses and many joys, which mathematicians have regaled us with since Euclid, and I think it's a good thing if people are more prepared to engage with abstraction these days. But it's probably not wholly a good thing. After all, there is also much utility and many joys in the physical and concrete, and I suspect that today we live in a world which prepares people markedly less well to succeed at the concrete. This is particularly troubling since many concrete activities make up the very most fundamental bedrock of the human condition (as it has hitherto existed).

In-person social relationships are of a concrete character. Leaving your house and doing shit is of a concrete character. Making and fixing things with your hands is concrete. Fucking is concrete.

I think it is possible, and potentially explanatory of some of the malaise I see among my peers, that we have grown up in a world which has taught us to shuffle symbols instead of to do things. People will blame this on their political opponents, leftists will attribute it to capitalism and rightists will attribute it to this or that form of effeminate progressive ideology, but (at the risk of being immediately dismissed by certain people) I want to suggest that, insofar as this is true at all, it might simply be best understood a consequence of industrial society itself. Abstract tasks simply get more useful and more in demand the greater the complexity of society grows and the more technology expands into our lives.

I don't want to present this sociological theory with too much confidence, and I am certainly not claiming we should burn down all the factories and go live in the woods or whatever. I'm just saying, uh... maybe this is something that's going on. I sometimes look around and think "this definitely might be something that's going on." And if it is going on, we should think about what its implications are.

It's definitely a thing that's happening. The question is whether it's a major factor.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland, @vague-humanoid

Note from the poster @el-shab-hussein: Don't fall for this shit. It's a lie meant to distract you from the fact his campaign worked with the fascist BJP to slander and attack Sikhs in the elections wherein he had to go up against Jagmeet Singh. Corrupt bastard. Don't buy into this shameless redscare tactic, China's just his scapegoat here.

Do you have any actual evidence for the claim you're making here?

Or are you just assuming it's false because it's an attack on China, and assuming that the goal is to distract us from that specific issue because that feels like a plausible motive to you?

I've asked this question before and been surprised by the results, now I have access to more weirdos it's your problem:

It is the middle of a Sunday afternoon. You have nothing on, and aren't expecting visitors, deliveries or post.

Unexpectedly, there is a knock at the door.

Not naming options to skew votes but...

I think there's something fundamentally baffling with the way most of you think.

I could deliver a walrus to your doorstep.

It would be strange and surprising behaviour on my part, I suppose, but not that strange or that surprising.

I believe we live in the end of the age of capitalism, we live in the century capitalism will finally die, but we must ask, what comes after, we will never be a hundred percent sure what it will be like until we start building it, so we must dream and imagine it, and multiple dreams will exist in one world, I am sure of it, I have multiple dreams, multiple imaginings, and none are perfect, but all are far better than now.

A dream of this small town with buildings of brick with plants climbing them, beautiful colours scattered, cars a rarity, the sounds of birds singing and kids playing in the streets, I am able to sit down on this comfortable bench, eating a sandwich as the world goes by.

A dream of going to a library and being able to get an audiobook, digital copy or paper book of anything, listen to stories as I sip a nice warm drink and watch, and hear people truly enthused to learn because they got to choose to without worry.

A dream of living in a village of maybe a couple hundred people, and going to a community gathering where people cook and share with all, and where the next day I help pull weeds from a kind persons garden, just because I can and they'd like the help.

Dream of worlds you would enjoy living in, as without dreams and stories, we don't have a future, to truly dream and imagine a better world is to start to create it, dream and share those dreams, as they will help bring on a better world.

You can already do most of this stuff. And where there are obstacles to doing so, most of them are only loosely connected to capitalism.

I've been reading a new comic called Kattabolt, which is too new for me to review yet. It's a'ight so far, though. The art is very cute, the story is moving quickly, and it tags all the characters who appear on a page for easier searching, which is surprisingly rare in webcomics, so it's one of those comics I'm keeping an optimistic eye on. (wouldn't mind some keyboard navigation, though).

But I can't decide how I feel about "Your advantage over me is null" from firey teenage street thug Ray in panel 4 there. On the one hand, it seems kind of an odd phrasing, both in general and for the character of a street thug (though if we learn Ray is some kind of nerdy street thug than this is great foreshadowing).

On the other hand, it's fairly elegant exposition, where Ray is completely justified in saying something he and Nathan (the purple guy) both know, that trusts the reader to make some satisfying conclusions of their own. From those six words, we know that it's not just that Ray has fire powers and Nathan and Leigh (wait, the gang duo has rhyming names? That's cute) have water powers. There's this whole system of elemental powers, that have Pokemon-style type matchups, and that was the main reason Ray didn't jump to beating Nathan's ass until he had backup (as opposed to, say, Nathan being a kewl action hero). We can also deduce that if Ray, a bully, was nervous at a type disadvantage and didn't learn anti-Nathan lightning magic to deal with this recurring nuisance, then he probably can't do it, and this is an Avatar-style world where people can use exactly one (1) element, only unlike Avatar there's elemental weaknesses. That's really a lot of information to be able to glean from six words!

It's also a good use of genre convention. The magic system in Kattabolt is "Avatar with type advantage", which is a system that's very easy to understand. Kattabolt takes advantage of this tropey magic system to be able to explain the entire thing in a single throw-away line and get to the interesting part of the comic.

Y'know what, I think I've talked myself into it. "Your advantage over me is null" is a bit of a clunky line, but it carries a ton of expository weight and lets me catch on to the magic system myself instead of treating me like an idiot or pretending "kung-fu with elemental magic" is some kind of novel idea worth spending six pages explaining. And that's more than worth a single somewhat awkward sentence.

If the word "null" is the problem here, couldn't it just be replaced with a more thuggish phrasing like "ain't shit"?

seeing people reblog dungeon meshi all the time is like, how I imagine something like made in abyss looks to normies

The thing about Dungeon Meshi is that it’s way more deathist than it initially looks, and the carnism is downstream of the deathism. It turns the fact “existing requires that you use energy” into the assertion “existing requires continuous destruction of other things that strive to exist just like you do.” Eating a fruit, eating an animal, or eating a human are all conflated into a single act of selfish consumption, so a certain kind of selfishness becomes something inevitable, unavoidable, and blameless.

I don’t want to overstate the ruthlessness involved here—the murderous “corpse hunters” Kabru kills are treated as taking it too far. And it also rebukes the short-sightedness of destroying so much that you have nothing left to make more food. But I still think the corpse hunters are a logical extreme of DM’s philosophy.

In general, I think Dungeon Meshi prefers pragmatism to idealism.

Marcille needs to accept death not because death is good, but because she isn't actually capable of beating it. It's not so much deathist as it is defeatist. Which is a respectable position, in my opinion, though I don't really agree with it.

The approach to other themes, from racism to economic woes to existing in this world while autistic, strikes me as similar. There's not really a "correct philosophy" being advocated for, and I suspect Kui distrusts all "correct philosophies".

Here's a panel from another comic she wrote about how to solve racism in a fantasy world:

It's notable that when Laios actually becomes king, the epilogues start talking about all the logistical problems and necessary compromises that rulership involves. Perfection is clearly not on the table.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

OH SO WE HAVE FUNDS FOR THIS BUT NOT UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME OKAY JUSTIN

That's less than a hundred dollars per Canadian. Closer to fifty, actually.

10 Apr 24

Times like this, I understand why some people are anti-voting.

So, what's the motive here?

Does he imagine there's some electoral advantage in this?