surprising number of idiots use Ukraine as an example of why open borders doesn't work, because if you allow people to travel freely without checkpoints between historical enemies like say Germany and France it also allows those countries to bomb each other's cities and.

So the theory here is either that Russians, as an ethnic group, lack a sufficient coherence and ethnic loyalty to practice warfare through violent crime techniques such as assassinations or through producing long-term demographic change, or that Vladimir Putin's formation has insufficient coherence and loyalty to practice warfare through similar methods. (Basically, once they left Russia, the Russians would just all defect.)

Isn't this just assuming that Vladimir Putin and people like him have a single fixed strategy and will not adapt at all to conditions?

An organization like a drug cartel can create a soft border through enacting low-level violence in an area, even if this is nominally illegal.

a campaign of assassinations by nationalist Russian immigrants is entirely possible, with the one flaw that it clearly hasn't happened, so you tack on 'long-term demographic change' which isn't a method of war and could never be one, but has the advantage of being impossible to say it isn't happening. Being a Russian nationalist and moving your family to Ukraine, aside from that not being what any Russian nationalist wants to do, isn't some victory against Ukraine- it just means your children, or at least your grandchildren, will grow up speaking, acting and thinking like Ukrainians.

The idea that Russian nationalists are, or would, immigrate to Ukraine en masse for the purpose of acting as a fifth column seems to just indicate a very poor theory of how people act. The fundamental problem seems to be that you are thinking of people as expressions of ethnic factions, rather than as individuals who make decisions based on their own desires.

Thank you for your response. On re-reading, I have decided that I did not adequately separate out the intents in that sentence, and so I have rewritten that section as, "or obtain control of the territory through short-term or long-term demographic change."

Is a country of 1 billion sending 6 million guys to live in a neighboring country of 5 million and vote for annexation a "war"?

Since no one attempted to shoot or bomb anyone, but the original inhabitants were pushed below the majority of representation and thereby lost political control of the territory, it could be called "a form of conquest other than war."

If it's a paid operation it's kinda war-ish, but official permission and lack of casualties separate it.

Regarding the rest, the actions of existing actors are tuned according to the existing conditions.

Governments do appear to leverage their ethnic diasporas for political ends, although these appear to be mostly first or second generation immigrants. This poses less of a challenge for moderate immigration than it does for high immigration. (Documenting examples and extent would be a good research topic if I ever do a formal write-up.)

Ethnicities are not unified rational actors, although they are potential fault lines. Ethnic bloc voting, ethnic favoritism, and ethnic riots are still issues.

A government is a power structure - and I have heard reports that some have tried to get more influence over their diasporas, meaning that diaspora behavior isn't solely about loyalty. Certain family structures, rules, or organizations may also be power structures or support them, causing greater synchronization/alignment of behavior.

My concern is that while Argumate is an atheist, I don't feel he has adequately addressed how to weaken these structures.

With borders, a high-fertility, high power structure strategy is less effective. You still have to do the war.

If you can take over territory by making more voters and keeping them loyal, without a war, this changes the meta - not for groups as unified rational actors, but for human leaders and for people embedded in the matrix of those power structures.

Edit:

Poi just posted something completely unsourced, so I cannot say whether it's real or not, but I can use it illustratively. We'll say it's a hypothetical example.

The move of only hiring Indians turns the company into an ethnicity-related power structure where someone in the network could be rewarded for showing ethnic loyalty, or punished for not showing ethnic loyalty. This would be enforced socially.

There is always an incentive in politics to defect and loot the commons. Just... in general. Right does it. Left does it. Race and ethnicity are pretty powerful points of coordination, because they're often visible, and people can't quit being a member of their race, nor can people aside from the intended recipients of a transfer join the group in order to receive the transfer.

Since the resources of each individual (including time and energy) are limited, each individual then faces a choice - do they invest in the central government, and race/ethnicity-neutral policy, or do they invest in alternative ethnicity-based power structures?

If the authority of the central government erodes, then its provision of services will no longer be reliable. When an alternative ethnicity-based power structure or network of power structures is just starting up, its benefits will also be limited or not reliable. However, as the level of investment increases, the level of provisioning it can provide - and the bid it can make for supporters - will also increase.

If the central governments are weak everywhere, due to inter-group fighting causing underinvestment in the commons, then ethnicity-based alternative power structures might provide more reliable insurance and security services. Legitimate businesses can't necessarily act as an alternative, as it is the political environment which allows them to exist.

In this way, an equilibrium could be reached where ethnicity is dominant even if the median person doesn't have a high baseline level of ethnic attachment, due to the shift in material incentives.

(It is my belief that there is a natural core of people who have high baseline ethnicity/ethnicity-like attachment, and a range from low to high, so it doesn't ever entirely go away, but it can be weakened or change form.)

While this outcome is not guaranteed, I feel that it is an under-considered risk in open borders discussions.

With a higher level of friction from regular borders with limited immigration, immigrants will have longer to marry into the host country, thereby making the people harmed by the looting of the commons their own children and grandchildren, while not having the insulation of an ethnicity-based alternative power structure to protect them, due to norms acting on individuals to prevent the formation of such structures while they are still politically weak.

But does this 'demographic conquest' actually happen? I can't think of a single example of demographic change being deliberately used to annex a state. The closest historical example I can think of is the Zionist movement in Palestine but that had already been colonised by the British so it doesn't really count and was pretty unique as colonialism goes. It also did still end up with an actual war to establish the state of Israel. Other colonialist projects like the US still required actual war to put settlers on land previously occupied by natives, ultimately leading to demographic takeover.

Just because something hasn't happened doesn't mean it can't, so is this theoretically plausible? Well for starters countries don't 'send' their people any more than Mexico 'sends' their worst, so this would have to be a decentralised mass action of people independently migrating based on their own judgement- which is to say that a decision to migrate would largely be based on economic and culture-fit factors. So this could only really happen when there is a big gap in living standards, leading to a large fraction of a country wanting to emigrate to one of its neighbours, and when the poor country is large enough that that fraction swamps the rich country's entire population (or, to be fair, maybe some more culturally aligned region within the rich country).

This isn't impossible, but there aren't many real world examples where sufficient desire to emigrate would be present- for example in a country of 40 million people like Ukraine you would need 40 million Russian immigrants. Even if that were possible it would be so much of a brain drain on Russia in the meantime that it would be a pyrrhic victory. But sufficient desire to emigrate isn't enough, because unless new houses, schools, etc. are being built for those immigrants, it's not happening. It will happen to an extent that starts to impoverish native proletarians, and then there will be enough pushback to tighten the borders again, and all Russia achieves is losing several million of its more ambitious young citizens.

To be clear, I'm not saying borders would have to tighten at levels of immigration comparable to the UK- remember for a demographic takeover you need the population to double in the space of a generation- maybe 2 generations, to be generous- which requires a monumental effort of housebuilding that I cannot see happening in any country except in the aftermath of a war. At that point the usual economic benefits of immigration would be far outweighed by the strain placed on the economy of capital depth being eroded. At that point highly permeable borders would no longer be politically sustainable. And that point will occur far before the point at which demographic takeover becomes feasible, which is to say I don't think demographic takeover could ever be feasible.

Which is I still don't see why you think this is a pragmatic concern instead of a right wing neurosis that they want you to treat as a practical concern to bring you into alignment with their views on immigration. Could you provide numbers or examples to show how this could be possible without first reaching other breaking points?

Texas is a straight-forward example of conquest by legal immigration.

Not that straightforward, though I was also thinking of the Texas example.

The issue is that Mexico/Spain never really had territorial control of northern Texas in the first place; the maps may have said so, but de facto that was Comanche territory. This was the original reason why Mexico was eager for American immigrants in the area in the first place- they functioned mostly as a buffer against Comanche raids. It's also why there were so few native Mexican residents, and consequently why there was only limited Mexican culture in the immediate area to be assimilated in to in the first place.

In the modern era, you might get a similar opportunity if a host nation invited open immigration to some uninhabited island, or to a really low-population-density area in Siberia or northern Canada. But it's a gambit that only worked in the heavily contested hinterlands of Mexico, and even then was sort of a weird case. Certainly the situation would have been quite different in Mexico City.

I keep chewing on this topic but people really seem to struggle to accept that intelligence is computable (in the technical sense of the term), presumably for the same reason they struggle to accept that humans are made of atoms (or "humans are complex assemblages of molecules").

but the consequence of this worldview is that anything that can be computed is not intelligence, so we end up with this god of the gaps situation where the definition of intelligence is constantly shrinking to exclude things that computers can now do.

a lot of religious people just say intelligence = soul and end the discussion there, which is obviously crazy but actually more defensible than the muddled middle who theoretically accept how the universe works but in practice retreat into vague platitudes that make no sense at all.

"that's not intelligence, that's just an algorithm! applied statistics!" well what did you think intelligence was, the divine spark?

there is a common equivocation between intelligence and agency, where a roomba can seem more alive than ChatGPT despite being less intelligent as it appears to have a more obvious purpose and move in a way that expresses some sort of desire: it is literally trying to get somewhere and do something, and of course a cat or mouse has far more intelligent agency than any AI system despite not understanding verbal language at all.

our sense of humanity rests on the trinity of intelligence, agency, and ineffable moral worth, and as computation consumes intelligence we shift our attention ever more to what we believe remains unique to us.

Two questions:

Do we *know* "intelligence" is computable?

Do we have a coherent enough definition of "intelligence" for the question to even have a coherent meaning?

we do not know for a fact that intelligence is computable, but if it isn't then that would require some uncomputable physics hiding somewhere in the brain that we haven't yet discovered, which seems pretty unlikely at this point; it's been 90 years and nobody has discovered anything that can't be emulated by a Turing machine yet (besides quantum randomness I guess? although perhaps even that could be simulated by taking both branches multiverse style, hmm).

we don't have a coherent definition of intelligence and that's kind of the point: every time we discover an algorithm for something that used to sound smart (playing chess, solving maths problems, explaining jokes) we decide it can't have required intelligence after all if an algorithm can do it, but if physics is computable and brains run on physics then there's an algorithm for everything.

I don't actually think that this is moving the goal-posts, I think our idea of intelligence is just very, very mushy.

Like, okay, I'm a poor unlettered fool, but it seems to me that the problem "create every single combination of Unicode characters for x number of characters" is a computable problem, right? As best as my stupid brain understands computability, you have infinite time and infinite memory. So if x is 3, you start with AAA, move on to AAB, and so on.

Make X high enough and eventually this produces every novel that will ever be written by a human being, as well as every mathematical proof, every scientific breakthrough, everything that was ever produced in writing.

So, is it the case that if I program my computer to combine Unicode characters like this I have built a machine that is more intelligent than any human being ever has been or will be?

It seems like we've gone wrong somewhere. I mean, for one thing it will produce tremendous amounts of gibberish, so much that it will utterly swamp any useful insight, second, even if my computer lasts as long as the universe there's not enough time to finish, and, well, it won't last that long, and in all likelihood will produce a lot of gibberish and then succumb to time before producing anything of worth.

It seems weird to say that a program that simply methodically combines letters is more intelligent than all humans and, for that matter, Chat GPT, even though as best I can tell it is an algorithm that eventually computes every Chat GPT output and literally every single human discovery and beautiful turn of phrase.

So does intelligence have a time element? Is it about producing a certain output within a certain time? Is it not merely about the output, but that the output has a certain relationship with the input? Is it about a ratio of useful outputs to useless outputs? If so what do we even mean by useful and useless in that last sentence?

Once you start introducing those questions, it actually doesn't matter whether the human brain is computable and some other thing is computable, it may be, and in fact almost certainly is the case that two things can produce, say, the exact same text output but that one was "intelligent" and one was not.

And like, I don't think those questions are, like, sophistry, I think they really are pretty important to what we intuitively imagine "intelligence" to be.

hmm not to be rude but maybe your idea is mushy? I don't know where that Library of Borges script came from 😂

yeah I don't think we judge intelligence by the output in isolation, we know that writing "e = mc^2" on a billboard doesn't make that billboard Einstein, but if you showed that billboard a sequence of physical observations and it spat out a meaningful theory to explain them then that would certainly count for something.

Right, I guess I'm saying I think that, for example, "agency" is not actually seperable from "intelligence" if you actually try to dig deep down into what people even think they are talking about when they talk about intelligence.

I guess my other point is that "infinite monkeys randomly hitting typewriters will eventually produce Romeo and Juliet" is a well known fact, but nobody has gone,

"Well, that means producing Romeo and Juliet does not require intelligence"

Rather, the conclusion is that intelligence is producing Romeo and Juliet in a certain way.

"Shakespeare producing Romeo and Juliet is an example of intelligence; a random text generator producing Romeo and Juliet would not be an example of intelligence" seems almost too obvious to say.

And, like, once you have that thought, you have potentially opened the door to statements like "Deep blue is a good chess player but that's not intelligence" or "ChatGPT is not an example of intelligence".

I guess my point is, this is not entirely some retreat to a metaphysical belief in the soul or something, I think this is like, actually integral to, like, pretty much any definition of intelligence that is even vaguely related to colloquial use.

I have to write all those words to be able to make the same point better in way less words that's how my brain works.

"All intelligence is algorithms" does not mean "All algorithms are examples of intelligence"

Which means, "That's not intelligence, that's algorithms" might be a silly statement, but "That algorithm is not an example of intelligence" can still be perfectly reasonable.

And, like... I do feel like a lot of people who say the former actually mean the latter.

There are lots of things that current-gen LLMs probably aren’t. Conscious, sapient, agentic, people. There’s a liiiiittle uncertainty there, enough to spook me, but it seems pretty likely to be true. But “intelligence” is a word that (traditionally) doesn’t mean precisely what those things mean, and does mean a bunch of other stuff.

If I write a prompt, “hey GPT, write a poem in iambic pentameter about fish,” and it does so correctly on the first try, that’s clearly a system that is capable of solving complex problems. If I ask it to write a cover letter for my job application, and it does so, then that’s clearly a system that is capable of reading and writing English.

If you try to Searle your way out of that observation with “well, that’s not really writing, that’s just producing text,” then like, yeah, there’s no objective way to resolve linguistic disputes like that. But honestly what’s the point of that dispute? When I say “can you write a poem” what I usually mean is “can you cause there to be a poem.” What I don’t usually mean is “can the ~ineffable quintessence of the human spirit~ emanate a poem.”

Human cognition, selfhood, and agency have always been something that we’re ignorant of. We don’t know how to talk about the underlying forces there, because we don’t know what those forces are, or how they work. So we detect and recognize these features using their products and their biological correlates, like speech, faces, and human bodies.

These LLMs, being the artificial systems that have come closest (so far) to human-like behavior, represent our best guess so far about what some of the forces and patterns underlying the human mind actually are. So it’s doubly silly to reject the idea that they are intelligent. First, because our definition of intelligence has always been functional, not essential, by virtue of our ignorance of how intelligence works in the first place. And second, because LLMs represent the best kind of evidence you’ll find about how intelligence actually does work.

And sure, maintain a healthy skepticism and always be able to ask yourself if this evidence is misleading. But also, shifting degrees of uncertainty and actionable confidence are a thing; you shouldn’t wander in to epistemic nihilism just to protect your ability to say “but the ~ineffable quintessence~!”

I’m sick, quarantining and bored

By design, or so I’ve been told? Like, I’m certainly not an expert, but when you drill back to the origins of the setting I thought the two main threads of it are A) a sci-fi reskin of Warhammer Fantasy and B) a fairly extended satire of WW2-era fascism (+Cold War +Thatcher). I’m given to understand that the early 40K content could even be quite goofy in this respect, with some fairly obvious gags- some of the silliness got preserved in Orks and such.

But I doubt that satire would be what you’d call targeted. Just because it was lampooning fascist sensibilities doesn’t mean it would have had a clear or precise definition of fascism. Mostly all this just comes from a very loose and ad-hoc sensibility; 40K was never one person’s story, just a bunch of cool minis to play with that slowly cohered in to a canonical setting as things progressed from Rogue Trader to the modern IP we see today.

idk if the optimal level of hating anything about yourself is 0 for everyone. tbh. like, uh. my aim in life is not maximizing my peace at the cost of anything else

what I mean is that, if I have strong values and preferences. and I consider them core to my self. sometimes they will conflict with other potentially-unchangeable attributes of me. and I do not take for granted that I must concede those preferences to gain peace with my attributes. sometimes it is fine to hate certain things and live with that hate. it means I give a fuck. I'm not going to kill any sense of discernment or taste so I can feel the same way about everything

If the optimal level of hatred is not zero, then the optimal level of self-hatred is also not zero. Accepting it in the general case means a proportional endorsement in the self-directed sense as well. I'm less sure of the prior, however. Discernment is important, and hating stuff is an important tool in discernment, but I'm not as confident that it's a necessary one.

Have officially reached the part of Roman history where Christian theological disputes matter

It's so abrupt too. Suddenly there's a sentence like "Some bishops were whining to Constantine about each other" and then it's instantly the defining story of European history for the next millennium

togglesbloggle said: I think you’re allowed to call that the end of antiquity, if you want.

You could, but historians coined "late antiquity" precisely to have a word for the ambiguous handwave gesture you'd otherwise have to make

Where *are* you going to stop, actually? I think your number of primary sources is about to go through the roof, but probably it's like 80% hagiographies by volume.

One does kind of want to hit Boethius, though.

I've said that organizational dysfunction should be a villain more often, mostly because of my belief that we need stories that give us information about how to deal with the biggest actual problems we, as a society, face. It's just very hard to write a story about organizational dysfunction that includes actually beating the organizational dysfunction.

But there's one place where organizational dysfunction does have an opportunity to show its villainous nature: videogames. Specifically, management videogames, where making decisions about organizational goals and who to hire is already central to gameplay.

Now, the average "management" game is not really about management per se. Everything is hyper abstract, you have a god's eye view, and you have ultimate authority over everything that you do. You are still looking for weak links and problems to correct, but a lot of that is pathing issues (if the game has that) or restructuring physical space.

So a management game that's about organizational dysfunction would be one where you're the new boss, looking to right the ship, and it would need to be an opaque organization, one where you can't just look inside someone's mind and see the "takes credit for others' work" trait.

I guess when I put it like that, I'm imagining something that's more like a detective game, as you do interviews and comb through piles of documents. And it's not as simple as "fire the bad people", because often those people are pulling a lot of weight, that's one of the reasons they've stuck around for so long, and replacing them is genuinely a hit to the company's ability to do ... whatever it's trying to do.

(Definitely also possible to do this same thing set in a government agency, a non-profit, or any other organization, though the actual problems will look at least somewhere different.)

If I were to give this a try, I think I'd give it a fantastical spin, just to heighten the ironies and wrap a little candy around the medicine. Actually, I'd set it in Hell.

You're an up-and-coming demon prince who's been put in charge of some sub-domain of Tartarus; the region has been missing its torment quotas, and Lucifer has sent you in to get things moving again. Failure, of course, is not an option.

Hypersaturated colors, cartoony, ironic tortures that aren't too messy. Different levels themed around different sins or 'types of guy', with the parody somewhat gentle. Go for laughing-with rather than laughing-at.

Start with a tutorial, somewhat pretending to be just a normal city builder- the schmoozy demon advisor starts walking you through basic controls about how to navigate the map screen, how to zone certain areas or order the construction of infrastructure buildings. But then, halfway through the tutorial, one of the spaces that you've zoned for a new Despair Extractor just... doesn't build. The advisor character assures you that everything's fine, one of the worker imps must have a nasty case of Hope, it'll be back by Monday and then construction can move forward.

Things don't quite go back to normal. Numbers in the HUD start changing in subtle ways without notice, options vanish from menus- were there always only 1,400 souls in the Infinite Dentist Office? Eventually, it's time for the grand opening of a big new Gate, with a huge flood of new damned souls primed to enter your halls, and things are getting downright weird. The schmoozy advisor is dragging things out, looking very nervous- until a demon you don't recognize pushes its way on to the screen, screaming in rage, and violently decapitates your advisor (the advisor's severed head is very upset about this; they're immortal, but it's very inconvenient).

Then the new demon looks around, sees your game interface, and starts laughing. "No wonder things have been going to shit", it says, and starts 'fixing' things by breaking pieces of your interface. "Wrong, wrong, totally made up, wrong..." When it collapses, the various bits of the interface fall over like wooden movie set pieces, showing how the original advisor had built a fake game interface for you. Eventually getting more and more vigorous until the entire HUD is just *gone*, and all you have left is your view of your domain from the balcony of your throne room. "Listen, boss. Normally I'd be happy to see you get dragged back to the Home Office to get chopped up in to Cerberus Chow, but unfortunately shorty here- " (kicks the severed head)- "has some friends in low places. If word gets back to Lucy about what I just did, it's my ass on the line too. So let's find a way to make this work, so that nobody asks questions and our mutual friend can spend the next few hundred years wearing a variety of funny hats as a paperweight on your desk."

And from there, the tutorial continues until you're ejected to the full game- basic construction and population mechanics are supplemented by the new systems, slowly rebuilding an actual interface reflecting your state of uncertainty. You're introduced to a council of people actually in charge of different hellish bureaucracies, each of which have their own agendas and lurking stories; one of them has a torrid romance with one of the damned souls, and is going soft about it. You order reports from different institutions, with different answers about your resources. Clicking the Ichor Stores icon lets you access a drop-down menu of different reported values, and you can set one source to the default if you trust it enough, or input your own best guess. And so on.

Throughout the game, the two different advisors stick around (one of them stuck as a head on your desk), and these two hate one another. You slowly learn to play them off against one another, so that when one of them is lying, the other will try to call them out on it. Of course, they do that when one of them is telling the truth, too...

I guess if you think metaphysics is just like epistemic procedures you're not a materialist. You're an idealist. Like straightforwardly so. Like believing that the world is only real insofar as its knowable is a pretty firmly idealist view.

Surely it’s less “the world is only real insofar as it is knowable” and more “whereof I do not know, I do not speak.” If the sphere of knowable things is smaller than the sphere of true things, metaphysics as a valid way to approach knowledge might be limited to epistemics or whatever, without reality being anywhere near as limited.

It would make very little sense to be making positive claims about unknowable things, surely?

im one of the angels assigned to guard god's throne and i keep shaving a piece of wood off one of the legs so it gets progressively thinner and weaker until one day it will snap like a matchstick and the big man will topple from his seat of power to grace the ground with his holy ass. of course he's omniscient so he already knows this and will have to banish me from heaven when it happens, but because of free will he has to give me the option to repent right until the very end. we both know i'm not going to do it but the rules that define our very being won't let us take any other course of action and besides he made me this way, so really the joke's on him no matter what.

I see your "shaving bits off the throne of Heaven" and raise you "slowly eating the Holy Grail."

not gonna reblog that post but like. if your problem with copyright law is 'corporations can pay artists to own their art and then forbid them from using it' then you should perhaps spend five seconds considering why artists are taking that deal and whether that deal not being on the table would be a better or worse situation for them

i mean to be super cynical for a second i think many artists took that deal because they didnt know that they wouldnt be allowed to use their own work later, most stories ive heard of artist caught in that show that the artists didnt expect that and that they wouldnt have signed if they had known. but to be fair that is only of the examples ive heard, i dont know if there is a way to know if that is the majority of cases

right but you see the obvious selection effect, don't you? people who understand what it means to sell your intellectual property/how work-for-hire works are less likely to go around complaining about disney stealing their work, because they knew what they were getting into. 'the average person complaining about disney stealing their work didn't understand the contract', even if true, is a very different statement from 'the average person who chose to give disney control of their work in exchange for money didn't understand the contract'. and you need to consider the entire universe of people who choose to take that sort of deal.

sure but by your very premise neither you nor i know how many people are out there who are perfectly happy to give up their work and i dont know if we can confidently assume that they are probably more than those who regret it

it seems intuitive to me you can estimate it by looking at all the people doing it without complaint, and doing it repeatedly for different creative works, etc. which is, like, the supermajority of people who do take that deal. if you don't want disney to own any of your future creative work then stop working for disney now and don't sell them anything later, etc.

also, like, do you also take this approach to every economic transaction, assume people did them by mistake?

Almost certainly better for artists is the answer to the question in the first post.

Like, that's glib, but what in practice work for hire often gets popular because of a combination of artist and the actual copyrightable art.

If you create a Batman character that sells tens of millions in merchandise every year, you can't go, "I need to renegotiate my contract otherwise I'll start writing Harley Quinn for Disney"

Particularly in the low or pop art sphere people get attached to specific franchises, which means the owners of the franchise can say, "We are letting you write for Batman/Star Wars/Harry Potter and the moment you assert yourself we'll get someone else to write for it and it will still make a kajillion dollars."

If copyright doesn't exist, DC never hires you to write Batman and you never create a character you could then theoretically write for a competitor for more money. Primarily because DC is not a large profitable comic book publisher, because those don't exist without copyright.

Those aren't the only two options. Current copyright law is compatible with a model where creators retain ownership of their creations. Rowling did not have to give up ownership of Harry Potter in order to get Bloomsbury to publish her books, for example.

Obviously DC and Marvel operate differently than traditional book publishing, but that's by design, not necessity.

Agreed!

Copyright law is a way to artificially create market demand for cultural products, that's all. It's compatible with basically any division of those profits between the primary artists and the corporate entities that they work with to finance and distribute their creations.

Low remuneration for artists doesn't follow from copyright law, it follows from low barriers to entry in to artistic fields, and a comparatively high number of aspiring artists relative to the amount of money that people have to spend on art. There's just a ton of people hoping for a slice of that pie, and some fraction of them are willing to accept a relatively small piece if that's the only deal they can get; as a result, it's usually pretty easy for the companies who handle financing/marketing/distribution to get away with very favorable deals for themselves.

Some artists take those deals with full knowledge, some are completely blindsided, but I'm guessing the average version is closer to "kind of understands that this is shady, but feels desperate enough to take a deal that exploits them."

Self-Harm

One of my most shameful memories surrounds a guy I’ll call S.T. It was one of those lamentably common situations in grade school- a somewhat odd kid who got picked on for years.

I’m sure there were specific bullies coming after him in particular, though I never saw who it was. But there was a much wider circle of gawking, othering, and exclusion; as far as I know, he never really managed to close that gap with his peers before graduation, if he even wanted to.

There’s a particular moment that stands out in memory. It wasn’t a climax or anything, just unusually clear in some of the particulars. The classroom was emptying out, and S.T. was seated in the front row, one of the only people still in their desk. I and a few other people were standing near the door, talking between ourselves.

The thing you need to know about this room was that it had those chair-desk combo things; plastic chairs with metal supports to one side, for a small desk space projecting forward and around where the presumptive student is meant to sit. Each was a separate unit, not bolted to one another or to the floor, but in pretty compact rows so that the desk-space of one was usually in physical contact with the back of the chair in front of it. In other words, lines of force could move from chair to chair- one student in the back row could often give a bit of a kick to someone several chairs in front of them.

S.T. being S.T., this was something he’d been on the receiving end of, many times before. So that day, when he felt someone give a sharp kick against his back, he didn’t encourage the bullying by looking backwards or making a fuss. He just shoved his own desk back in retort, jolting the desks behind him, and went back to packing up his bag. He got another kick, he retaliated again, and he and the bully went back and forth like that in a petty little cycle of quasi-violence.

Except, nobody was behind him at all.

The first kick happened as an accident; he’d shoved his own desk backwards by a few inches while he was leaning down to grab some notebook or other, and the desks behind him absorbed the shock all the way back to the rear wall of the classroom. A couple of the desks buckled, and built up force, until it sprung back against his own desk in the front row again. He interpreted that as some willful act by a bully, kicked back on purpose- compressing the entire row of desks like a spring that inevitable sprung back against him.

Retaliation followed retaliation, and I and my friends watched on in silent astonishment as S.T. bullied himself. It’s pretty hard to play back that particular memory in my head, realizing with an adult’s hindsight what kind of accumulated pain that moment must have represented, and how easy it would have been to intervene and make a positive difference.

There’s a story that’s making the rounds today, about a shootout between a Jewish man and two Israeli tourists:

There are some clinical ways to talk about this; an extreme case of “trapped priors”, in which the fear of violence and the racial bigotry combine to create a perception of risk that literally cannot be anchored in reality, a fear that justifies itself with its own senseless convulsions of violence.

But in the end it’s not something that needs a specialized vocabulary. Pain just makes us so goddamn stupid. And here I am again, watching from the doorway, doing nothing. I’m not even sure what ‘doing something’ would even mean in this case, at least from the perspective of a bystander who doesn’t know either the perpetrator or his victims.

Any theory of the world really needs to reckon with this as one of the deep animating forces of history, I think. It’s not a fully sufficient theodicy, but I’m guessing it comes a lot closer than one might naively assume; I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in some grand accounting, this kind of self-harm contributes to as much human misery than the more direct forms of interpersonal violence and antagonism which precipitate it.

How much of the broader Israeli-Palestine conflict is driven by the very same paroxysms of self-delusion that drove this shooting in Miami Beach? How about the war in Ukraine? How about the crackdown on trans rights in the United States? How about- ?

Interpersonal harm can originate in any number of ways: competition for scarce resources, recklessness, actual malice, and often just sheer ignorance. That harm begets itself through retaliatory cycles and escalation. And then, at a certain point, cycles of violence between us become cycles of violence within us, and we start building that suffering in to the fabric of the world as we construct it.

But in a peculiar way, I think there’s some optimism in that. Competition for scarce resources is to some degree intractable, but this kind of delusional self-harm can sometimes pop like a bubble. It will always be vulnerable to being broken by contact with reality, and the chaotic mess of the world as it actually is.

Some days, I dare to hope that the world was always this stupid. That the great wars of our ancestors were just as groundless as ours, and their bigotries just as preposterous. That the narrative of history that we weave is just the robe of Shem and Japheth writ large, covering our father’s nakedness. Because if it was always this stupid, then this subjective feeling of rising nonsense and absurdity— that feeling means that we are getting better, that we are slowly but surely expanding the scope of our awareness. Feeling somewhat foolish is the necessary price of becoming less foolish, however you slice it.

I don't mean to derail this post, but wanted to say that the war in Ukraine is very different as it comes with no racial tensions or the like. At most you could say that Putin is afraid of NATO but given that NATO exists to defend against him, it's unclear how insane that is. Really it seems like the whole thing started because Putin personally is a power hungry asshole. Before 2014 Ukrainians and Russians were like yeah we're pretty similar people. I doubt there was a single Russian family objecting to their daughter's fiance cause he's Ukrainian. And now this.

Totally valid counterpoint in this case, yes! The Ukraine war has an unusual relationship with ethnicity, with both sides trying to manufacture and litigate the boundaries of nationhood in ways that I probably don't understand all the subtleties of.

That said, I don't think the kind of self-harm I'm trying to point at here is something that necessarily has to cleave along ethnic (or racial/gender/national/sexuality/etc.) lines, even if it often does. I'm certainly not trying to reason about the behavior of populations, so much as individuals en masse; which is why S.T. keeps being an iconographic part of my thinking with this stuff.

In the case of Ukraine, I was really thinking of (as you say) Putin himself, and of the specific advisers and powerbrokers that supported or pushed him towards the invasion. Looking through the English translations of his speeches on the topic, it's very easy for me to read these as the protests of a profoundly wounded man. And there is a lot to psychoanalyze there. Rising through the ranks of the KGB must have been harrowing in the extreme, and to have paid that price to a sovereign state that no longer even exists-- well, there are a lot of stories there to tell, and we'll never know what the truth is.

And none of this is to discount the very real material situation on the ground, the realpolitik of declining Russian influence, transitions away from fossil fuels, the expansion of the EU and NATO, all that. But I do have the sense, in this case, that all those factors were necessary but not sufficient to spark this war, and that it pivots on the particular brokenness of Putin himself, and the ways in which a self-destructive antagonism has become a part of his identity.

median cost of living by country is not primarily driven by baumol's cost disease! different expenditures drive different outcomes! the house you get for $2/mo in the forests of Borneo sucks ass! It's not an equal quality of life curve, that's a different metric.

I'd think the test of this would be how much it costs to build & possess the Borneo house in your location, right? (Or, roughly triangulating a realistic price, since regulations would probably prevent you from actually building it.) And to limit yourself to the same amenities and commodities more generally.

And I think the weirdness comes from the fact that while the Borneo house does suck ass, the difference in cost of living doesn't come mostly from those amenities or the size of your house or anything like that, particularly in urban areas. It's pure location; most people literally can't afford to own (and many couldn't afford to rent!) an empty lot in a major city, let alone some transplanted house from Borneo. Once you price in access to a high-value community, little extras like "electricity" and "running water" just aren't driving as much of the difference.

The price difference becomes significant once you're comparing a life out in the boonies between Borneo and, say, Iceland. At that point, the value of the dirt your house is built on might drop to a smaller fraction of your home's total worth, and the amenities, commodities, and construction can start to be the main driver of overall cost difference. (Which is why imo "by country" should occasionally paired with "by city" for a fuller understanding, with the boonieses across different countries modeled as having substantial similarities as well as differences. "Country" isn't always the correct basis for comparison.)

Obviously land value differences are "real" in the sense that access to that community really does improve quality of life dramatically. So this isn't Baumol's per se. But it is the case that the value of having access to those communities can scale infinitely high as the city itself gets richer and more technologically advanced, in much the same way that Baumol's can. And further, that this value is collectively created by the community as a whole, while its dividends are being disproportionately captured by landholders; as the value of community goes up, rent rises to match, until QoL for the poorer economic brackets falls back towards the lowest sustainable equilibrium.

Dead-eyed smoking a cigarette at the bar watching yet again as an aggrieved cadre of terminally-online post-materialist youths overcorrect on marginal swings in the median voter share to justify sweeping ideological attacks on the last wave of ageing thinkfluencers they are desperate to replace in the trend cycle and dreading having to endure their kayfabe that This Time It's Different.

(source)

These people are much better examples of what I meant when I talked about Trump voters mostly wanting to be absolved of responsibility.

They want to say whatever they want in the moment and be in a position where nobody will criticize them or push back.

Which is an understandable fantasy, but I cannot emphasize enough that this is not a general principle that they want to extend to other people.

The scary thing is that to this kind of person there is absolutely no difference. That's another thing I mean by not wanting to take responsibility. Everything they do is "the bit".

January 6th was part of "the bit" and they deeply resent the idea that people are pretending it was some serious big deal when really it was basically nothing, and crazy liberals are trying to pretend that this dinky little protest was some kind of "insurrection".

It is, simultaneously, an amazing and serious outpouring of energy that will transform the country, one of the greatest mass movements in American history.

It is seriously serious AND the bit, simultaneously, depending on their psychological needs at the time.

That's what I mean by not wanting to take responsibility, they want to live in a bubble where they don't have to take their own actions seriously.

PS - This is something I've noticed about how conspiracy people network even when they have radically divergent world-views that aren't compatible. They signal to each other that they aren't going to hold each other to any actual specifics. This is not necessarily too sinister in the abstract; putting differences to the side to take on an enemy is important sometimes.

But at the same time, if you go too far your soul curdles because you no longer have any principles at all. I do think this is why so many conservative religious people flock to Donald "Grab em by the pussy" Trump. In exchange for not taking Trump seriously, he won't take them seriously either, and he'll shield them from the kind of people who would take them seriously.

Responsibility, the way I mean it, is the belief that there is a valid distinction between "a bit" and "being serious".

Once you start to believe that, you then admit that your actions can be measured by *some* standard. It doesn't matter what, just that there might come a time when you could say, "I did that, but I shouldn't have" or, alternatively, "I should have done that, but I didn't."

Trumpism is a rejection of that world view, a promise that everything you do is just "the bit" and so nobody will be able to tell you "You should have done this, but you didn't, so I will punish you."

And you won't have to privately entertain those thoughts in your own head either.

At the lower levels it is driven by an at times justified dislike of the kinds of people who are in a position to judge your actions, a sense that worthwhile things are being judged unfairly by people who shouldn't have authority.

At the influencer level described here it is a total abdication of responsibility.

What looks like, and frankly is profound hypocrisy is a kind of signal; "I won't take your homosexuality seriously and in exchange you won't take my white nationalism seriously."

This works as long as you're embattled and have plenty of outsiders to bully, but these people do terrible things to each other as part of the bit, too.

I'm much too tired to hash this one out properly, but...there's something to be said here about the dissolution of consensus reality.

Responsibility-as-you-define-it, the idea that serious thought can and must be distinguished from posturing, rests heavily - for most people - on the idea that truth is (a) knowable and (b) socially recognized. Both parts of that idea have suffered serious disintegration of late, in the general consciousness. Experts have gotten a lot of egg on their face. The fragmented world that we see through the internet is a place where, no matter what you believe, lots of people will agree and lots of other people will hate and despise you for it. There's a widespread perception that the cultural movers-and-shakers are just constantly making shit up and issuing new proclamations about the Truth of Everything. Science is supposed to be the great bulwark of objective truth, but right now our highest-profile cutting-edge scientific wonders are things where no one can even agree on how they actually work or what they actually mean or what they can even do.

So why not just say whatever you want and call it Truth? Everyone else does! Seems like no one can tell the difference anyway!

Mmm, but this is (to the extent that morlock is correct) a much deeper form of ontological despair than that, no?

There's a world where people reject experts, live in the reality of their own choosing, but still hold themselves to a consistent set of standards and judgments- bespoke standards and bespoke judgments, maybe, with no real connection to the ground truth, but consistent all the same. There's absolutely nothing stopping such a person from being fundamentally principled and even honest.

What morlock is describing is a lack of persistent adherence to any concept of reality, not just a rejection of consensus views or an antagonism towards the regnant institutions of the day. They're not calling their thing 'Truth', with or without the capital T. They're occupying a much more transient world than that, where the idea of a persistent reality is inadmissible, and the satisfaction of impulses or of the ego fills in the gap where understanding used to be. This is the same relationship with reality that you find in a Michael Bay movie, for example- where any given scene is exciting and captivating, but the superstructure simply doesn't have a coherent relationship with itself, and it isn't meant to.

I know we sent a probe out and all, but what do we think? Is there life on Europa or is this just a hype train going nowhere?

We know that similar environments (Enceladus) have “complex disequilibrium organic chemistry”- we sampled its oceans, and got really sophisticated internal carbon chemistry centered probably around hydrothermal vents on the sea floor. Notably, the instruments we sent last time wouldn’t have detected actual microbes in that moon’s seawater as it was being ejected to space, so for all we know freeze-dried desiccated xenobacteria were being squeegeed off Cassini’s windshield the whole mission.

So I don’t think it’s at all implausible that we find… well, I’ll hedge my bets and say “a chemical process exhibiting natural selection to a substantial degree.” But I think it’s also not unlikely that we’ll find a pre-cellular chemical environment rather than mature bacteria; in other words, that we’ll find the wild ecosystem version of the thing that the inside of a cell is the tamed garden version of.

Alternately, we might find a totally sterile world, with any organic chemistry being simplistic and ‘closed.’ Nobody really knows the chances of these things until we go out and look, it can’t be reasoned from first principles.

Like, I dunno, I think it's one of those things like death, where thinking about it at all is probably a sign that you're not feeling well, but that doesn't make much of a difference to the analysis.

@transgenderer This surprises me! It's basically just

(1) If learning, summarizing, recalling, connecting information, theorizing, etc. becomes better done by machines than humans, then eventually the function of humans in the sciences or in history or anything else will be essentially data collection and digtization, menial research-assistant labor while the machines do the thinking—or at best, being a cheap inferior substitute because the computer's time is too expensive (for now) to waste on your trivial problem. This makes studying such a field essentially a waste of time.

(2) Even more immediately, if machines are bettter at clear exposition, felicitous expression, etc. than humans, then not only will there be less demand for the expressions of humans, but... it will no longer be the case that being good at expressing yourself is a scarce skill that leads people to listen. Because anyone can massage their clumsy ideas into soaring prose. I do think there's some intrinsic connection between clear thought and clear expression, but I would be surprised if the difference was still detectable some ten years from now or so.

So talking and thinking both become basically onanistic—nothing to discover by thinking and no audience to talk to, unless you're a charismatic celebrity in the latter case, or if the problem is so trivial that no one has bothered to apply automatic processes to it in the former case. A pretty depressing future, and one in which the economic value of intellectual and verbal traits enters a precipitous decline, much as physical strength did over the course of the industrial revolution (but probably a lot faster); and if human intelligence loses its economic value, I would expect its waste products to lose their interest to future humans, too. Certainly the twee "authentic" kind not meaningfully distinguishable from in-every-way-more-satisfying mass-produced varieties.

The economic impacts of AI in general can be very hard to reason deeply about, just because "labor is a kind of capital now" is just a wildly unprecedented situation. We're all basically dumb when it comes to figuring out exactly what happens when you can, without limit, spend money to buy more thinking, accumulating more and more hours each day devoted to problem-solving around some shared vision.

But even if we take the (rather implausible imo) view that this doesn't all go science fictional very quickly, this kind of analysis still neglects the political angle in a big way.

In particular, I think it's pretty widely neglected how much the need to establish dominance hierarchies and interpersonal prestige is, like, a load bearing element of the economy as it currently exists. Physical toil and menial labor are some of AI's biggest challenges; those are at the bottom of the prestige hierarchy. The AI revolution doesn't quite nab the tippy-top upper crust of society- that's self-perpetuating wealth from investment dividends, and other forms of functional aristocracy- but it hits almost every other part of the middle and upper strata in a way that automation never has before.

The cultural order won't stay inert in response to that. Remember that many of the "knowledge workers" displaced by AI will be lawyers, which is to say, politicians. What do you think happens when the Mitt Romneys of the world wake up one day and realize that they have less economic influence than a migrant farm worker?

AI is going to produce an economic system that no longer reflects the traditional hierarchies of human society, and will badly decouple purchasing power from traditional indicators of prestige. In that environment, laws regulating markets and economic production get very soft and very malleable, very quickly. This is because currency itself, in this scenario, is in the process of losing the mandate of heaven. And as time goes on, that pressure will distort and alter our economic structures until they find a way to recapture that air of legitimacy, or cede the throne to something else that can.

The precise ways that'll happen are kind of anyone's guess, we're still only in the early stages of finding out what the great ideologies of the AI era will look like. The early stages will involve some kind of UBI, of course, and that'll keep the old order going by itself, at least for a while. But after that? IDK. Something interesting, surely.

The (seemingly-)"novel" experiences that AI brings in its earliest incarnations are (necessarily) just latent in the space of actually-existing conversations, it's just at that (this) point never really been formally referred(-pointed)-to as a latent space

words, merely rearranged on the page

Occasionally, very spooky words!

Humans are the most important species on Earth since what, the cyanobacteria that became chloroplasts maybe?

somewhere there must be a high score table ranking species by how much they've succeeded in fucking up the atmosphere and on god we are going to top it

Gotta be honest even if we nuked the whole planet I'm not sure we'd match the Great Oxygenation Event

If the microbial spores on the Mars landers (the ones that survived our sterilization processes and the vacuum of space during transit) manage to hold on long enough to adapt to the local environment, we are *already* the most important thing to happen to at least one planetary atmosphere by a wide margin. Just not Earth.

Or I guess, the microbes are. But we’re solid pitch-hitters for the microbes.

That said, even by Earth standards we’re pretty high up there. The radioactive particles in the environment are gonna stand out like a sore thumb in the rock record. Our associated extinction events are less major than e.g. trees so far, but we’re probably still top… IDK, my gut says top 25 but not top 10 on that. Whole new classes of minerals to be found, naturally.

On that note: did you ever read the Silurian hypothesis paper, and if so, what did you think of it?

Oh man, this is a fun paper- hadn't seen it before, but I've had this conversation a bunch at different conferences. The type of thing you do when you already have tenure and you want to have fun with something.

I think they cover all the really obvious bases, but they're probably a little over-cautious about the type of obviously anthropogenic industrial products that any industrial civilization is going to lay down. They (probably correctly imo) point out the specific industrial byproducts of our civilization shouldn't be presumed universal- plastics, chlorine and fluorine compounds, etc. But the basic definition of "industrial civilization" presumes some kind of mass-manufacture and large scale production, and it's rather dubious to presume that any civilization would completely avoid the bulk use of synthetic/anthropogenic compounds.

It's a statistical certainty that there are many opportunities for any given intelligent biological entity to use such materials in pursuing its values more efficiently or more effectively; synthetic compounds of this sort are simply going to solve some problem, somewhere. Probably lots of problems. Preventing such waste products, at direct and uncompensated cost to the entities themselves, would require a fantastical degree of cultural conformity across the entire industrial period, or a deliberate and highly effective 'cleanup' effort by post-industrial intelligence. And that prospect begs a whole lot more questions than it answers!

Basically, I think it's valid to say that geologically stable 'obligate anthropogenic' compounds are an expected feature of the vast majority of all possible industrial civilizations. If a thermal excursion in the rock record contains no novel compounds without a known natural pathway, then that really should be treated as strong and meaningful evidence that it's caused by geological or biological forces, rather than technologically mediated.