Moldova isn't the only plausible option or anything, my reasoning is just, it has good land, the population is low enough that they could be bought out a price that isn't too absurd, they're relatively poor and could use the money, it's a relatively new country with a culture similar to a number of other countries and it's squarely in western territory and thus shouldn't be much of a source of conflict.

Cultural identity, in any reasonable world, is about the people around you and your way of life, not where you are on a map.

(In theory you could buy a piece of land, but in practice, countries are unwilling to sell.)

Buying land from governments really hasn't been a very legitimate concept from the beginning. Even if they are willing to sell, the people living there probably don't want you ruling them, and where they don't want to sell, I fail to see the crime against humanity in paying people to move to another country until there are few enough left that you can walk in, become the super majority, and declare yourself the new government.

Of course, that doesn't mean men with guns won't try to stop you. I can very much see how elites with guns like this environment where no one ever has the option of forming a new country, or buying out their own country from under them. The problem here is that people who are not powerful elites tolerate this, and don't consider that we could cut governments out of this equation entirely.

Somewhat nitpicking

this has not led to a biological singularity.

I would argue it has. Fooms have a sort of relativistic element, where being inside a foom does not feel special. Just because history is running millions of times faster than before, doesn't really feel like anything.

With all of that said, what is and isn't a foom is somewhat blurry at the edges, but I'd argue that biology, brains, and farming all qualify. Conversely, that more has happened in the last couple centuries than the previous couple eons. Of course, this claim is heavily dependent on the definition of "things happening", in terms of say, mass moved, none of this has mattered at all, but in terms of, things mattering, the gap seems nigh infinite.

Looking at the  world from a perspective where fooms have happened, in fact, multiple times, doesn't give me confidence that fooms just aren't physically something that's allowed.

I direct skepticism at boosters supporting fast enough timelines to reach AGI within the near future, that sounds like a doomer only position.

In the end, children are still humans.

Half of childhood is a social construct. (In particular, most of the parts pertaining to the teenage years)

Half of the remainder won't apply to a given particular child. Humans are different.

A lot of that social construct was created as part of a jobs program. You shouldn't expect it to be sanely optimized towards excuses made up fifty years after the fact.

Childhood has very little impact on future career/social status/college results. They've done all sorts of studies, and various nations have more or less education, and the only things I've seen that produce more impact than a couple IQ points are like, not feeding your children. Given access to resources, after the very early years, children are basically capable of raising themselves.

In summary, it's best not to concern yourself with social rituals more than necessary and just learn who the actual person in front of you is, and what they need.

I note one of my problems with "trust the experts" style thinking, is a guessing the teacher's password problem.

If the arguments for flat earth and round earth sound equally intuitive and persuasive to you, you probably don't actually understand either theory. Sure, you can say "round earth correct", and you can get social approval for saying correct beliefs, but you're not actually believing anything more correct than "this group I like approves of these words."

My experience is that rationalists are hard headed and immune to evidence?

More specifically, I find that the median takeaway from rationalism is that thinking is hard, and you should leave it up to paid professionals to do that for you. If you are a paid professional, you should stick to your lane and never bother thinking about anything you're not being paid to think about.

It's a serious problem rationalism that half of the teachings are about how being rational is hard, doesn't work, and takes lots of effort. It sure sounds nice to be a black belt truth master who kicks and punches through fiction and superstition, but just like a real dojo, the vast majority, upon seeing a real black belt, realize they'll never stand a chance in a fight against him, and give up.

More broadly, I see a cooperate defect dilemma where everybody's better off in a society of independent thinkers where everybody else is more wrong, but in diverse ways that don't correlate, such that truth is the only thing that does correlate. However, the individual is better off being less wrong, by aping wholesale whatever everybody else is doing.

In summary, the pursuit of being as unwrong as possible is a ridiculous goodharting of rationality and doesn't work at scale. To destroy that which the truth may destroy, one must take up his sword and fight, and that occasionally, or rather, quite frequently, involves being struck back, because lies are not weak and passive entities that merely wait for the truth to come slay them.

This is sort of restating the same argument in a different way, but:

it is not in the interests of humans to be Asmodeus's slaves.

From there I would state, does assigning the value [True] to [Asmodeus], via [Objective Logic] prove that humans should serve Asmodeus, or does it prove that humans should ignore objective logic? And if we had just proven that humans should ignore objective logic, were we ever really following objective logic to begin with? Isn't it more likely that that this thing we called [Objective Logic] was in fact, not objective logic to begin with, and the entire structure should be thrown out, and something else should instead be called [Objective Logic] which is not that, and doesn't appear to say humans should serve Asmodeus?