>It is heartbreaking what happened to a generation of men.

Uh-huh. Which of these predictions made in 2015/2016 came true by 2020 when Donald Trump left office?

* Donald Trump will cause a stock market crash.

* Donald Trump will start WWIII.

* Donald Trump will kill or jail journalists, leftists, and members of the LGBTQ community.

* Donald Trump will ban all Muslims from entering the country.

* Donald Trump will never allow another election to occur as he will become dictator for life.

* Donald Trump will create internment camps for immigrants.

* Donald Trump will outlaw gay marriage.

* Donald Trump will ban abortion nationwide and institute a Handmaid's Tale-type dystopia.

The answer? None of them. I await the replies that these aren't the same thing and they all Really Happened or are Totally About to Happen:

>"I'm going to admit I was wrong about the timeline on all 10 things," he assured me.

>"See how you prefaced it?" I said. "You're just saying that you're wrong about the timeline."

>"Why am I going to abandon the truth?" he insisted. "I can't abandon the truth."

You can also see the mirror-image of Q-anon currently alive and fermenting at /r/somethingiswrong2024 on reddit.

This isn't a male issue (or female) or a right wing (or left) issue or a social media (or mass media) issue. It's a perennial human issue. It preceded mass media. It succeeded mass media. It will succeed social media.

One apocalypse or another has been at hand for more 2,500 years, always heralded by mouth-foaming prophets with dire predictions of imminent disaster. And their failure to materialize always blindly waved away by certain demographics of the earnest and gullible. And there's always a Qoholeth to every Jeremiah shouting as loudly "Nothing ever happens."

Babylon didn't fall for centuries after its prediction of imminent destruction. Jesus didn't come back in that generation's lifetime. The Mashiach is absent. The Mahdi is missing. Capitalism is still around and the Proles still in chains. There has been no Malthusian Great Starvation. There are still snows on Kilimanjaro. Obama remains an American citizen. Trump remains an American rather than Russian liability. JFK Jr is still dead. Kamala Harris still lost.

If there's one lesson to be perennially learned, it's that there's nothing perfectible about humans and their relation to culture. The delusional will always be with us and they'll always claim it's really the other side that is deluded, akshually.

These things all seemed like possibilities, but not certainties. And some of them did at least partly come to be: there was an attempted Muslim travel ban, and abortion was banned in vast swaths of the US. The internment camps are definitely being talked about seriously.

Further, the 2016 list wouldn't have possibly guessed "will badly mishandle a pandemic, turning the US into one of its worst victims", but that is indeed what happened. He didn't outlaw gay marriage, but he did ban trans people from the military.

We did benefit from one important thing: his incompetence prevented him from accomplishing much of anything in his term. He has now had time to prepare -- or rather, the right-wing think tanks have had time to prepare. He's implementing their priorities as fast as he can.

* xXx_nataliste420_xXx is now playing In the End by Linkin Park [3:36] [Playing] [played 467 times] [Nu-Metal]

This dynamic is not exclusive to those claiming to be part of an insular community of freethinkers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25667362

What exactly do you mean?

Curious: Do you think J.D. Vance unintentionally dog-whistling a Scott Alexander article when he's on the Joe Rogan podcast was orchestrated or just what happened?[0]

---

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1ggl0mh/jd_...

What is "unintentionally dog-whistling" supposed to mean?

Isn't intention the essence of the concept of the "dog whistle"?

I'd also like to observe that Scott Alexander does a yearly survey, which provide unusually robust evidence that if we're going to impute to him the cultural affiliations of those who read his posts, his politics can only be "all of it".

The dog whistle is a message hidden to those not in the know. An unintentional dog whistle is a hidden message shared by mistake. Either not intended and so a false message, or not intended but accidentally shared.

Sophistry is actually really really old:

>In the second half of the 5th century BCE, particularly in Athens, "sophist" came to denote a class of mostly itinerant intellectuals who taught courses in various subjects, speculated about the nature of language and culture, and employed rhetoric to achieve their purposes, generally to persuade or convince others. Nicholas Denyer observes that the Sophists "did ... have one important thing in common: whatever else they did or did not claim to know, they characteristically had a great understanding of what words would entertain or impress or persuade an audience."

The problem then, as of now, is sorting the wheat from the chaff. Rationalist spaces like /r/SSC, The Motte, et. al are just modern sophistry labs that like to think they're filled with the next Socrates when they're actually filled with endless Thrasymachi. Scott Alexander and Eleizer Yudkowsky have something meaningful (and deradicalizing) to say. Their third-degree followers? Not so much.

Yudkowsky texts represent my mental image of a vector continuously scanning a latent space in some general direction. Changes just pile on and on until you come from concept A to concept B without ever making a logical step, but there’s nothing to criticise cause every step was a seemingly random nuance. Start at some rare values in most dimensions, crank up the temperature and you get yourself Yudkowsky.

> our coherent extrapolated volition is "our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted (…) The appeal to an objective through contingent human nature (perhaps expressed, for mathematical purposes, in the form of a utility function or other decision-theoretic formalism), as providing the ultimate criterion of "Friendliness", is an answer to the meta-ethical problem of defining an objective morality; extrapolated volition is intended to be what humanity objectively would want, all things considered, but it can only be defined relative to the psychological and cognitive qualities of present-day, unextrapolated humanity.

I doubt that a guy who seriously produces this can say something meaningful at all.

Was anyone else ever able to construct a mathematical model of CEV?

I don't think Eleizer Yudkowsky has anything meaningful to say. He is a doomsday cult leader who happens to be fashionable in some circles.

While I won't claim he currently has much of interest to say, he definitely explained a lot of important ideas for thinking more clearly to people who would not otherwise have encountered them, even if he didn't invent any of them.

A Wolf had stolen a Lamb and was carrying it off to his lair to eat it. But his plans were very much changed when he met a Lion, who, without making any excuses, took the Lamb away from him.

The Wolf made off to a safe distance, and then said in a much injured tone:

"You have no right to take my property like that!"

The Lion looked back, but as the Wolf was too far away to be taught a lesson without too much inconvenience, he said:

"Your property? Did you buy it, or did the Shepherd make you a gift of it? Pray tell me, how did you get it?"

What is evil won is evil lost.

>He has plans to travel to the desert soon, to ghost towns in Texas and New Mexico, areas that fell on hard times when the railroads closed or the highways diverted past them. Some still have infrastructure in place, he said, and beautiful architecture. “Why isn’t there an app that gets a whole bunch of people together? And they go buy a town, refurbish these towns, and bring it back to life,” he asked. “All the people that want to get out of the city and want to spend less money.”

It seems like you're accusing Socrates of making the worse argument the stronger and corrupting the youth?

I'm not accusing long-dead Greeks of corrupting long-dead Greeks, as I'm pretty unconcerned with the affairs of long-dead Greeks.

I'm accusing modern philosophers of spreading stupid and often harmful ideas because they are too enamored with a few long-dead Greeks to admit their ideas were often stupid and harmful.

What is the real heart of philosophy?

The real heart of philosophy is that it is an academic discipline that attempts to formalize a method of inquiry that is by nature iconoclastic and resistant to definitive answers. Philosophy also attempts to create rigor in an area where, unlike some other academic fields, most humans can do it, but most do it very poorly (myself included).

>If nine people are comfortable sitting down at a table to eat lunch with a Nazi, then there are ten Nazis at that table.

"If you associate with the untermensch, you are also untermensch."

>Of course, you could debate just how close Musk's views are to the tenants of National Socialism but the point is that his rhetoric and actions closely mirror some of the more vile parts of that ideology and could encourage people to act in certain ways that are detrimental to the safety of certain groups.

"Don't look for context or look too deeply. You are being attacked and in danger. Feel--Don't think. Only feel and act."

>I guess what I'm saying is, don't split hairs for justifying what has happened, and just delete your Twitter account.

"Don't think and do what we tell you."

>Downvote me all you want; my grandfather didn't watch his countrymen get gunned down on Omaha beach from his US Navy ship for someone to throw Roman salutes at the inauguration of a President.

"Succumb to this emotional appeal to patriotism and blood sacrifice to justify why you should stop thinking and unthinkingly do what we tell you to do, now."

Someone is behaving like Joseph Goebbels, but I don't think it's Elon Musk.

Yes Nazis loooove to play games like this, because Nazis thrive in the grey area that is the benefit of the doubt. But we saw the salute, he overplayed his hand. There’s no grey area. If you Nazi salute you are a Nazi, I don’t make the rules. Don’t like it, don’t heil Hitler.

"...[F]or it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."