No, I'm fairly confident the neoreactionaries, for whatever reason you brought them up, would happily join in the plan to strip out the objectionable bits of Pakistani culture and replace it with something better. Also, demanding more integration and acculturation from immigrants. What they probably wouldn't listen to is the apparent contradiction of saying we don't need to get rid of multiculturalism, but we do need to push a certain cultural message until it becomes universal.
My intuitions say that specialism increases output, so we should have an all-controlling central state with specialist optimal-career-distributors and specialist psychologist day-planners who hand out schedules and to-do lists to every citizen every day which must be followed to the letter on pain of death and in which the citizens have zero say.
To me, this seems like a happy wonderful place that I would very much like to live in. Unfortunately, everyone else seems to strongly disagree.
I think there's an implicit premise or two that you may have mentall...
I think you missed what I see as the main point in "What they might have considered, however, was that there was no valve in their pipe. Aiming to purify the American state, they succeeded only in corrupting the American mind." Not surprising, because Moldbug (the guy quoted about the Mugwumps) is terribly long-winded and given to rhetorical flourishes. So let me try to rephrase what I see as the central objection in a format more amenable to LW:
The scientific community is not a massive repository of power, nor is it packed to the gills with mast...
I know it's at least possible to have variant names; I am legally registered in different countries by parallell names analogous to "Venice" and "Venezia".
And "Patriarchy/Rape culture", according to SJWs, is those high-status industries and positions which shape public opinion and public policy - roughly, the respectable press, Hollywood, the Silicon Valley, the video games industry, the Ivy League, and so on.
This is not something I have ever seen asserted, and it sounds to me as though you are drawing a false parallellism here, so I'd be curious to see which SJWs that is according to. Moldbug points to a set of organizations when he says "Cathedral", and you could taboo the word into ...
"The Cathedral", according to Moldbug, is those high-status industries and positions which shape public opinion and public policy - roughly, the respectable press (i.e. not the National Enquirer), Hollywood, the Ivy League, Southern Poverty Law Center, etc. It's not a way of explaining away anything; it's an attribution of blame for how present public opinion has turned out, combined with an assertion that these information organs form a natural group (left). Somewhere between Moldbug's rants about how the big universities should be torn down and...
Horseshoe theory seems to me like declaring North on a compass rose to be "middle", and saying as you go further "east" or "west" around the compass, the extreme east and extreme west gradually become more similar to each other. This is a mismapping resulting from the confusion of "east" with "counterclockwise starting from north" and west likewise - to restore the analogy to its origin, I think the political axis has here gotten mixed up with some other attribute or set of attributes.
To look at it another ...
That's like arguing that because the line between "dog" and "wolf" is socially constructed, there's no need to worry if one's chihuahua is replaced by a timber wolf, or saying that because the Greeks thought of water as a basic substance, "hydrogen" is actually a social grouping.
It's true in the trivial sense that every grouping humans refer to is in some sense a social grouping, but that doesn't alter the underlying biology. Think of it as lumpers and splitters in action - disagreements over where to draw the boundary of a group don't change the characteristics of group members.
Why are you equivocating between the biological grouping and the social grouping?
Maybe Napoleon could be viewed as the Paul of the French Revolution, molding the French state into a highly successful military power while still keeping some of the principles like the overthrow of king and church? Rousseau and Robespierre seem to me like they were both charismatic radicals with impractical ideas.
Tinfoil hats and air vents to blow away the pheromones, as I recall. But there's certainly some incompetence involved when the demons use highly outdated military intelligence in their choice of targets, resulting in a devastating attack on the Arsenal of Democracy.
As I recall, the justification for this in the story is that the demons are really long-lived, and human civilization has historically been very slow to change, so by demon standards decades-old intelligence on humans is recent and it's reasonable to expect that Detroit would still be a very imp...
I think this could be generalized into a model with predictions: If we suppose that it's easier to get people to nominally than actually abandon one of Haidt's moral axes (from Wikipedia, to save people some lookups: Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Liberty/oppression, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation), we should expect that people who disclaim one of the axes will find ways to relabel violations of that axis to make it sound like it's violating a professed axis.
To be specific, if you have a group that officially disclaims the ...
Ehh, The Salvation War has some interesting moments about facing down existential threats and not giving up and building a bright future for humanity across the corpses of eldritch horrors, but you have to be willing to slog through a lot of drek. I read the first book of The Salvation War and it can't seem to make up its mind just to what extent it's supposed to be following any particular cosmology, mythology, or theology. I get the impression that it wants to be a chronicle of the moment when humanity cast down the Hordes of Hell, but it's executed more...
I'm not sure what your point here is. Please clarify?
I'm arguing that segregation is forbidden in America and similar countries; it seems to me that calling segregation "strictly voluntary" clouds the issue. It's almost a fully general argument to say that X is strictly voluntary because you can do it if none of several million people stop you doing it.
This sounds like to me as though it's essentially a giant recapitulation of the trolley problem - you have one side claiming that the opposition doesn't understand 5 > 1 and isn't trying to maximize utility and should be pushing the fat man onto the tracks, and you have the other side not wanting to violate obvious moral norms such as "Don't push people onto train tracks where they will die" for the sake of hypotheticals that are not merely unlikely but unrealistic. (How is that man so fat that he'll block a trolley going fast enough to crush ...
By analogy: Private property also includes (must include, in my opinion) the freedom to "impose" it on those who don't want it - If Alice has a bicycle which she considers to be her private property and Bob tries to take the bicycle because Bob doesn't believe in private property and doesn't respect the notion of "Alice's bicycle" in the first place, I'm damn well going to side with Alice in telling Bob to go away, and if necessary, threatening violence against Bob.
If you try to form a concept of "strictly voluntary private propert...
Well, you can adopt an ideology that members of the other race find more or less universally detestable and put up posters for it all across the neighborhood, but this has the consequence of filling your neighborhood with an ideology that lots and lots of people find detestable.
Something similar goes for phrenology (the prediction of mental attributes from head shape): Science can discover where phrenology works and which traits it can predict and where it stops working. The sheer number of possible traits and populations one can correlate makes me confident you'd find something scientific if you looked. But if science discovers that elongated heads predict high extraversion among Swedes, and is otherwise largely wrong or unpredictive, would you say that phrenology is science?
Steven Kaas quipped something I find applicable: "...
You're still in the 2012 thread.
Edit: No, wait, this is apparently posted in 2013 but labeled 2012. Bah.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Deeply amused by the section "Alternative Alternative Politics: Okay fine, knock yourself out identifying with as tiny and finely-grained a subcategory as you want" still missing my desired response. :-) (I put Other:Authoritarian as distinct from Totalitarian. My view of these is that the former concerns the power of the ruling body to hypothetically put its fingers in any given pie, while the latter concerns the propensity of the ruling body to have its fingers in a great many pies.)
And as a less tone-related complaint, sam0345 grossly overgeneralizes. (And if he's the J that I think he is, I suspect he's not much interested in being more nuanced, for much the same reason he's not interested in consensus.)
I think this is the source you want.
See the section Consequences of Artificial Methods, subheading 17.
The problem with non-compulsory voting is it means that only the people who care strongly enough about the elections to get off the internet and drive to a polling booth are the ones who have their voices heard. This means that you lose a lot of moderate, sane, rational voters but keep all of the rabid nutjobs.
OTOH, you lose a lot of ignorant, clueless, or just lazy voters who have no basis for forming an opinion, and the ones who have the voices heard are the ones who cared enough to study the issues, even if their study was one-sided.
Push the problem a step back, and my thought here is compulsory political study rather than compulsory voting.
This has traditionally been a very divisive point within radical feminism, and it typically divides the discussion into transphobic social-constructionist radical feminists (like the source of my original infographic) and neo-essentialist post-feminists.
Here's one: less jockeying for power. Monarchs don't need to pander to interest groups to get elected.
Monarchs don't need to pander to interest groups to get elected.
Merely to keep their heads attached.
That appears to be a malware site. Is it the same as http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~marinaj/babyloni.htm ?
Hard problem.
"Change your behavior if a significant fraction complains" fails to protect isolated victims, who are likely to be the most common targets of bad behavior and also the ones in most need of support. "Change your behavior if one person complains" is grossly abusable, and the first-order fix to complain about frivolous complaints spirals off into meta. Appealing to common sense, good judgment etc. seems to me like passing the buck back to the situation that created a need for this discussion in the first place.
As a secondary c...
I suppose he will be thinking along the same lines as a wirehead.
"Finally, we will also assume that the AI does not possess the ability to manually rewire the human brain to change what a human values. In other words, the ability for the AI to manipulate another person's values is limited by what we as humans are capable of today."
I argue that we as humans are capable of a lot of that, and the AI may be able to think faster and draw upon a larger store of knowledge of human interaction.
Furthermore, what justifies this assumption? If we assume a limit that the AI won't manipulate me any more than Bob across the...
Dear people who post things like "Incest is neat" and "Whites are smarter than blacks": those things are currently controversial. Therefore, they don't come close to being unthinkable or impossible to talk about.
ADBOC and that's somewhat beside the point, because it seems to me that things are necessarily somewhat controversial to be taboo. As Paul Graham said:
...No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as e
Whether I like it or not, people tend to overfit the curves associated with past trauma to available data.
If I want to avoid being pattern-matched to someone's trauma, I have to take extreme measures.
Hedge phrases pretty reliably don't cut it... they're like making incremental improvements to my bird-feeder to keep squirrels away: I just end up training the squirrels.
I am surprised and confused. I would have thought that the analogy to evolution would be the one objected to first, as I think of social institutions first as things instituted by someone and second as things subject to vaguely evolution-like processes. (They are modified over time, imperfectly replicated across countries, and a lot more fail than survive.)
Colonialism was a good system with significant beneficial impact for colonized countries, which are now failing mostly due to native incompetence rather than colonial trauma. It would be a win-win position to reinstitute it competently.
110% agreed. Hell, I often argue that in real life; there's no stigma attached to colonialism in Russia these days, probably in part because any serious attack on it sounds too much like a tired Soviet cliche.
The distant: I am diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome (an autism spectrum disorder). I was unpopular at school, I understood poorly how to fit in, but I understood well how to get smarter. I took high school completion mathematics exams in primary school, university exams in high school, and while I never bit a teacher like in HPMoR, I did punch a student one time and demand that the teachers back me up.
As I remember it, said student was talking about a "tirus" which was supposedly like a next-generation virus which would eat up your computer unless...
Smart people often think social institutions are basically arbitrary and that they can engineer better ways using their mighty brains. [...]
While I agree, I disapprove because my impression is that this is not an opinion suppressed much in the outside culture. I can well imagine it being an unpopular one here at Less Wrong, but in the world at large I see widespread support for similar opinions, such as among "conservatives" (in a loose sense) complaining about how "intellectuals" (ditto) were and are overly supportive of Communism, ...
Using Chesterton's Fence here is a little misleading.
The whole rationale behind Chesterton's Fence is that clearly someone put the fence there, and it seems pretty likely that whoever that was was just as capable as I am of concluding (given what I know) that putting a fence here is absurd, and it seems pretty likely that they know everything I know, and therefore I can conclude with reasonable confidence that they knew relevant things I don't know that made them conclude that putting a fence here is worth doing, and therefore I should significantly redu...