michael vassar

@KatjaGrace @RatOrthodox In the adaptive environment, in high food abundance contexts, presumably the first group planned coordinated hunting expeditions and the second group hunted and partially domesticated the first group. traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2019/2/23… Is a recent example.

@RichardMCNgo @jessi_cata @slatestarcodex I don’t know how to interpret this tweet as a hypothesis or model instead of as a rhetorical move.

@HiFromMichaelV @jessi_cata @slatestarcodex The “part of a larger story” thing is something like: a lot of people are very scared due to their sense that society is organized into a hierarchy. Because of that they’re primed to participate in self-fulfilling dynamics like Molochian races.

The world's most consequential Molochian dynamic is the race between AGI companies. But several of the leading companies were significantly influenced by @slatestarcodex (e.g. as below). So perhaps we should think of Scott as having *summoned* Moloch.

To be more fair, Moloch points at coordination failures in general but in practice gets invoked in response to persistent information asymmetries, which embed structural power relations in the discourse. Some of those, like in medicine, are exogenous to recent politics, but most of the time there’s a desire to conflate those with the political situation discussed at the beginning of Mediations on Moloch, where people are forced to electrocute one another.

@jessi_cata @lumpenspace Catallaxy is Elua, not Moloch. And Moloch is just a cope for bullied nerds when the bully keeps saying ‘I can’t hear you’.

uh i now understand what's the main disagreement between me and most non-r/acc smart people in this simcluster. i personally don't think that catallaxy needs believers in order to work—quite the opposite: you need believers to go against it, and thus making it work more cruelly

@Wurmserscribit @ben_r_hoffman

Slightly more books are published in Hebrew annually, despite much being read among Israelis also in original other languages, as are published in the entire Arab world annually, where English is rarely read. Israel publishes about 1/10th as many books in Hebrew as the U.S. does in English, despite its being 1/35th its size. I would assume thus Hebrew is a useful language for expressing ideas.

If Kamala Harris had won, Iran would still have their nuclear facility. Our southern border would be OPEN. Our free speech would be censored. Hamas would still have hostages. Maduro would still be in charge. Thank God President Trump won!🇺🇸

Don’t you think that makes you and your family safer when you go to the hospital? I certainly do!

@RichardMCNgo @jessi_cata @slatestarcodex That’s strictly harmful. Stop making cover stories that are bad in themselves but not sufficient to explain the real problem hypermemetic.

@jessi_cata @slatestarcodex Standard economics is antimemetic in various ways which often prevent people from extrapolating its principles. Moloch is a way of making those principles hypermemetic and thereby more self-fulfilling at large scales.

It’s still 30 years away. But LLMs will cause the Vingean Singularity before then and right on schedule for 2030.

The most prolific White breeders of all time are the Amish, the Mormons and the Puritans (also see Haredi and Orthodox Jews in the West) These all have something in common and it’s the direct opposite of what BAP is suggesting If you want higher birth rates you need less degeneracy, not more, as is being suggested here.

oh yes -- a nuclear deal would have really kept them from developing nuclear weapons

I heard Chuck Schumer say, “Our objection as Democrats is not to photo ID.” So I gave Senate Democrats a chance to prove it—by bringing a simple voter ID requirement bill to the floor. They blocked it. foxnews.com/politics/gop-s…

One potential explanation for the erasure rapidity which I haven't seen elsewhere (I may have missed it), is that progressivism requires constant successful displays of power, and right now those opportunities are slim. Cannibalizing a past but now dead hero of the movement for previously ignored but now momentarily important sins is an easy victory. No one outside the movement cares much; everyone inside the movement is addicted to the dopamine hit.

So it turns out almost every member of Congress did insider trading on the #IranWar They bought stock options and future contracts on oil Some made milllions Imagine a country sending young men to war- and their first instinct is to call their stockbroker

Ah yes, this must have been a missile Iran developed since Israel killed Khamenei… three weeks ago. Definitely believable.

It is in America’s interest to win this war so decisively that we can walk away from the Middle East for a decade & let Israel & the Gulf States manage the lawn maintenance

War Resolve In the past, casualties were the important and real limiting factor in any war. Today, people are worked up over a transitory increase in the price of gasoline and the most evil regime on earth is banking its survival on the West being more concerned about money than lives. Consequently they even execute teenagers without fair trials to create fear among the population to prevent an uprising. And the global anger is over gas prices not the executions. It will take resolve to see it through. The Iranians appear to have enough command and control left to launch desperate attacks on the region and suppress people at home. The aims of the operation have not been met until that chain is broken and the regime can no longer inflict terror on the world. And that may well take another month or so to accomplish and so the world will have to decide if it can withstand a temporary bump in gas prices to rid us of one of its most evil actors whose despicable actions are even more evident each passing day. Hopefully we can find that resolve because the good of ridding the world of this regime, ending its terror network and ending its threats against the West far outweigh a spike at the pump that will quickly be forgotten once this is finished.

Which matters a lot more because it’s upstream of the contemporary political mainstream.

So, now that we can apparently discuss Cesar Chavez’s depravity, can we start acknowledging Foucault’s?

The bridge does not cost $114 million. The corruption costs $114 million. An almost-identical bridge in Colorado (The Greenland Wildlife Bridge) cost $15 million because it only had Colorado levels of corruption, instead of preternaturally Goku-level corruption of California.

free association and having a thing you're trying to do together that the individuals feels some stake in seems like the absolute bare minimum for "socialization" to not be a toxic form of institutional hazing