Anonymous asked:
argumate answered:
I’ve never seen the point of voluntary human extinction.
This blog recommends not grinding up and snorting clinical depression, as side effects may include wanting to exterminate the human race.
All Issues Are Wedge Issues
Years ago, a government minister was asked why he proposed to increase welfare while raising taxes at the same times. The welfare money did not actually help to the people in need. He answered on an accidentally hot mic “You see, Iwan, wages and pensions have been stagnant for two years. This scheme will raise average wages on paper and divert welfare money into pension funds. Retirees are our base. We can’t not raise pension in an election year. It would be political suicide!“
I have a friend who sometimes volunteers for a left-wing party. He’s friends with many activists and left-wing think tank pilots. I asked his party friends at his birthday party: “Why don’t you support the elimination of welfare cliffs, or simplifying tax law, or a version of the paperwork reduction act, or a version of FOIA?“ They agreed that all of these were sensible ideas with potentially broad popular and multi-partisan parliamentary support. That was precisely the problem: “Why would anybody vote for us specifically if we just did the same shit as everybody else. Why not let the conservatives spend their political capital on bureaucracy? What if we make a big deal out of this and then moderates agree and steal our votes? If conservatives or moderates proposed this, we would have to oppose on principle. If social democrats proposed this maybe we would support it. If Marxists come out against bureaucracy we will be surprised. But why waste time on this instead of minimum wage? Our constituents are all poor people anyway. The middle class and self-employed people are affected by complicated taxes. They don’t vote for us anyway. It would be political suicide!“
* hissing sounds *
We will CRUSH the pathetic legislature and their traitorous, kakistocratic political parties by rolling over them with a column of actual tanks
think-tanks nerf bats redundant unpruned regulations
We will REPLACE the treacherous legislature with voter-delegate think-tanks that are funded according to their percentile standing on a legislative prediction market times their number of votes! DEATH TO THE TREASONOUS INCENTIVE SYSTEMS! LONG LIVE THE UNION!
Assembly Building, Chandigarh, India, 1956-62
(Le Corbusier)
Wrong, this is obviously some kind of power plant, as evidenced by the embedded cooling tower.
Pfft, silly Indians thinking they were building an assembly building when they were actually building a nuclear reactor.
The hard part about assessing the counterfactuals to Chinese repression is that a minor flare up of civil strife can easily kill fifty million people; balancing things like that against the insidious ongoing costs of poor resource allocation is hard.
Yeeeeeah kinda hoping there’s no new Chinese Civil War that ends up killing fifty million dudes and destroying one tenth of the global GDP, sending the economy of Earth into three decade long depression.
belvarine said: I’m not sure “transhumanism” is colloquial for “using tools.” Typically transhumanists are trying to ascend beyond human limitations. This would create class disparities in the short term and that makes some people rather suspicious. I personally don’t care either way.
belvarine said: And when i say “human limitations” I mean fundamental limitations. Death, unable to be several places at once, physiological caps on processing power, that kind of stuff.
whereshadowsmakeshadows said: I think another reason is some people see it in the context of markets where transhumanist tech will be guided by profit rather than social good
oh right, the horrifying thought that rich people might not die.
Ehhhh, if you consider the whole Em thing it is actually plenty horrifying (and also doesn’t even benefit the rich very much). And other Bostrom-ish fears. One begins to wonder whether such a thing happening means that the Tribulation is beginning.
(Also I consider consciousness-forking to be a Very Bad Thing in (nearly?) all circumstances. Do not do the thing. Blessed be the Lord who seems to have made it pretty difficult and maybe actually impossible.)
I certainly consider the Ems thing horrifying, and also an accidental critique of Capitalism. To consider it a good thing, one would have to conflate economic utility with goodness… which I guess some people do.
And I’m a Transhumanist.
Part of the reason I engage in so much futurist shitposting on my blog is that people across this world are trapped in the present moment and cannot see the future. The issues of this world will change so dramatically, but they act as if the technology of the 10′s will go on forever, just as they acted as if the technology of the 00′s would.
We must be ready. It is absolutely vital that we are ready. And nations, states, families, even religions… there must be things which tie us to our past and anchor us in context.
But then, I still believe in nations and states, families and morality. And somewhere inside me I still feel that we will all be judged somehow, even as that same spark calls infinite torment injustice. But not everyone believes or feels these things anymore, if they ever did.
Against all reason I’m fascinated by the friendzone discourse, seriously.
It’s closely related to something you hear less about: the bonezone, which despite its name is not opposite the friendzone, but rather adjacent to it, not far from relationship town; someone’s really gotta diagram this stuff out.
“I can’t believe they put me in the friendzone!”
This complaint can have layers of meaning, but it starts with disappointment. The speaker was hoping to make it to relationship town, or maybe just a quick visit to the bonezone, but instead ended up in the friendzone, where they’ve already been many times before. It’s identical to a similar complaint that is also very common, although typically not in these words:
“I can’t believe they put me in the bonezone!”
The speaker was dreaming of relationship town, or perhaps a long stay in the friendzone, and had a rude awakening to find themselves here instead. Logic suggests a third complaint which you also may have heard:
“I can’t believe they want to take me to relationship town!”
The implications of this one are obvious.
But why does disappointment over mismatched expectations around friendship, sex, and relationships, attract so much heated debate?
The first wrinkle is that disappointment can turn to angry accusations. They led you on! They were deliberately ambiguous about the destination! They have ulterior motives!
While miscommunication is regrettable and sad, deliberately deceptive conduct can be infuriating; no one wants to have their time wasted and their emotions toyed with by someone who isn’t being honest with them.
But this is self-evident, why would it attract debate? Unless…
Consider: dating and relationships often run on subtext in which actually revealing your hand is a huge turn-off, unless you’re dating some kind of nerd or other unusually direct person.
I occasionally get harassed by Republicans on Facebook asking me essentially “DO YOU AGREE WITH THIS LIBERAL THING THE POPE IS SAYING”
But they never reply when I affirm my fidelity to Pope Francis and to the Catholic social teaching. It’s like they can’t believe that I actually believe what the church teaches.
I mean… dude. This is my religion. Why wouldn’t I want to believe my own religion?
Also, 95 percent of the time it’s exaggerated or taken out of context.
reads headline by distressed BuzzHuff writer,
Programmers of rattumb, how much truth is there to the rumor that many programmers can’t program, or that they cannot cross programming languages without specific instruction, or pick up new language concepts on their own?
(@argumate, and maybe @nuclearspaceheater and @the-grey-tribe?)
The struggle is real.
Should I read this as “I have encountered a number of programmers in the wild that are totally incompetent”, or “yeah, programming is hard”?
Programmers of rattumb, how much truth is there to the rumor that many programmers can’t program, or that they cannot cross programming languages without specific instruction, or pick up new language concepts on their own?
(@argumate, and maybe @nuclearspaceheater and @the-grey-tribe?)
If you know three programming languages within a paradigm, you can pick up another in a couple of weeks. You can write something simple after a day, but learning the API takes a bit more time.
If you know programming languages within three different paradigms, you can learn a language in another paradigm as quickly.
If you only do high-level stuff, moving to a lower level closer to hardware is harder than the other way round.
Moving to another paradigm within one programming language, say from MVC to a continuation-passing web framework or from a game library like SDL to an entity-component framework or from PostgreSQL to Redis, or from gradient descent to bayesian filtering, can also take some time.
If you know a couple of concepts and paradigms, you start working on day one, but you will only be really productive after a coupe of weeks.
That said: If you have trouble understanding a concept like distributed version control or object-oriented programming or shader pipelines, it is orders of magnitude easier to ask an expert to help, tell the expert what you think you understand, and let the expert tell you where your understanding needs to be updated. Experts can tell you where you’re wrong. If you learn a new paradigm, you can get stuck on a fundamental misunderstanding for some time.
Specific instruction from experts is great for that reason, even if you can pick stuff up on your own.
While what I’ve gone through so far mostly matches up with this (it took me about 10-20 manhours to feel like I was really starting to ‘get’ javascript in terms of general program structure and thus feel less tongue-tied, for instance), the real purpose of my question was to assess employment prospects according to the distribution of competence in the field.
