The ultracatholics on this website aren't actually trying to "debate" you. They think they are trying to save you.
What is actually happening, is they're saying inflammatory things that get strong negative reactions from readers. People yell at them in response. This generates a feeling of being attacked, so they can continue to see themselves as an underdog.
This entire dynamic can be shortcutted by simply blocking them and moving on with your life.
it's remarkable how few catholics i encounter here. ty mutuals.
not to mention the whole Synagogue of Satan / Jews literally worship Satan quasi-gnostic quasi-Marcionist notion that gets thrown around a lot among Christian antisemites (e.g. Kaiser Wilhelm)
The ruling powers during the first world war appear to have been convinced that their opposite numbers were Satanists.
I think it likely that the reason this polemic had any effect was because, being aristocrats in that time and place, although they had outwardly to follow Christian norms, they knew that all the mysteries had been revealed, but could not help but see themselves as Satanists (cf. the also late Victorian Crowley). This brought them into an uncomfortable relation with the Jews who had been insisting all along that the Christian mysteries were no mystery at all, but were plainly what they appeared to be.
The Great War, brought down by their own actions, shocked them and they felt collectively the fright of the esoteric Satanist who discovers after a working that "this stuff is all real" and so they naturally turned on the Jews to bear the guilt for them.
It's a very practical response for Jews to attempt to pre-empt this kind of betrayal/predation.
Knife crime is such a weird, bullshit category. I mean, it should be obvious. As far as I know, no other country apart from the UK has a category like "knife crime". They may have a statistic about stabbings, sure. But they don't really make a big deal out of stabbing versus bludgeoning versus strangling or whatever way there is to kill people with household items.
The category of "knife crime" is either an amalgamation of junkie armed robberies, domestic violence, bar fights turned lethal, premeditated murder, and gang violence on the street, or it's a euphemism for gang violence on the street.
But if you try to solve "knife crime", and you are really trying to talk about gang violence, but what you are measuring is stabbings, then of course no single policing trick and no single community intervention is going to equally affect youth gangs, drug addicts, and wives stabbing their husbands.
Knife crime is an intractable problem because it's an intractable concept.
it's a good concept if what you want to do is keep British people unarmed. the nexus that connects all of these is "carrying a knife" which is the central "knife crime" that the police take seriously.
It’s all about making it safer Nazis to starve “useless eaters”. It’s basically a British national sport nowadays.
mostly i think the police are lazy bastards who worked out in the 80s that the Second World War and Postwar Hobbitisation campaign worked so successfully that British people did, by the eighties, believe "liberty" is American nonsense and what counts is crawling into your hole, being communal and safe and Keeping Calm and Carrying On, so we could be convinced that owning weapons is evil, which makes policing a much easier job.
The simultaneous importation of people from countries that hadn't been Hobbitised was a challenge, but racism can do wonders, especially next to pillarisation. I wonder for how much longer, though.
i feel like my fundamental break with like 90% of like, "orthodox rationalists" (so to speak) is that i think hyperbolic discounting is basically good actually, for uncertainty reasons. i think your uncertainty about distant events should increase so rapidly that even exponential effects quickly die out
To bring this back to Tetlock (Lord, how long has it been since we did that?), I think he actually furnishes pretty good evidence for this in his work. His superforecasters could make surprisingly accurate predictions of events and phenomena one, two, and even sometimes five years out, but once you got into events one or more decades away, pretty much no one, experimentally or anecdotally, seems to be able to predict things with any consistency.
(Inter alia, this militates against the claim made by Scott Alexander and others that Tetlock wasn’t really saying anything they weren’t already saying on LessWrong; if Tetlock is right, you cannot just place your faith in a a theorem called Bayes’ past a certain time horizon.)
Good timing to raise this topic, because we have longer-term evidence now! From Astral Codex Ten, last month:
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Superforecasters are pretty good at telling you who will win next month’s sports game, next month’s election, or next year’s geopolitical clash. What about the longer-term? Can they predict broader political trends? The distant future of AI? Until now, we didn’t know, for a simple reason: superforecasting was only a few decades old. Philip Tetlock did the original Expert Political Judgment experiments in the 80s and 90s.
In a predictive success of his own, Tetlock realized this would be a problem early on. In 1998, he got experts to make predictions for the next 25 years. Specifically, he asked his forecasters to predict the course of nuclear proliferation and various border conflicts. Some were geopolitics scholars were were experts in these fields; others weren’t. It’s been 25 years since 1998, so we’re ready to open the time capsule and see how they did.
Before answering: how do we judge the results? That is, the subjects made some guesses about the world in 2023. Let’s say a third of them were right. Is that good or bad? Does it mean people can predict the future 25 years out, or they can’t?
Tetlock proposes several specific questions, of which I’ll focus on the three I find most interesting:
- Will forecasters do better than some hacked-together algorithmic guess based on base rates? For example, if we ask “will countries X and Y go to war in the next 25 years?”, will experts outperform just guessing the base rate of war between those two countries (or two similar countries) over a 25-year-period?
- Will experts do better than non-experts?
- Will wisdom of crowds work? That is, will the aggregate of all forecasters beat most individual forecasters?
The paper finds:
- Yes, forecasters beat base rates by a small amount (d = ~0.25) even at the 25 year distance.
- Sort of. Experts beat non-experts on nuclear proliferation (d = ~0.40), but not on border conflicts. One possible explanation is that nuclear proliferation experts are good and real but border conflict experts are bad and fake. But another explanation is that the last twenty-five years of nuclear proliferation was “well-behaved” and followed popular theories, and the last twenty-five years of border conflicts were anomalous.
- Yes, the wisdom-of-crowds aggregate beat all individual forecasters when considering the entire time period; looking only at the 25-year-out-predictions, it beat almost all individual forecasters.
So does this mean skeptics were wrong, and long-range forecasting is definitely possible? The paper’s discussion section is ambivalent:
Meliorists can now claim systematic evidence for long-range geopolitical forecasting skill, an elusive phenomenon that some Skeptics had declared impossible (Taleb & Blyth, 2013) and one for which all previous evidence was anecdotal. Proliferation experts beat both well-educated generalists and base-rate extrapolation across time on the key empirical-accuracy indicator: they assigned higher probabilities when proliferation occurred—and lower values when it did not. Achieving a higher Hit rate at a lower False-Alarm rate proves proliferation experts were not indiscriminately crying wolf. Experts’ edge even held across controversy and close-call-counterfactual challenges to accuracy scores, which blunts the flukiness-of-history objection. Moreover, proliferation experts did better on logical-coherence indicators. Their judgments were more scope sensitive and aligned with the normative model for compounding cumulative risk. And they did all of this under far-from-ideal conditions: making rapid-fire judgments, about one nation-state per minute. They drew on insights more accessible to epistemic-community insiders than to outsiders—a hallmark of genuine expertise. A natural next question is: How much should Radical Skeptics change their minds? But that question is premature. The findings did not always break against them. Expertise failed to translate into accuracy on over half of the questions: those on border-change/secession. Moreover, the data are limited to a narrow slice of history—and the questions posed a deliberately biased sample from the universe of possible questions: slow-motion variables chosen to give forecasters a fighting chance. It is unwise to draw sweeping conclusions from so wobbly an evidentiary base. Whatever long-range predictability emerged is due to loading the methodological dice: posing easy questions in a placid period of history. Each side is now armed with talking points: Meliorists with a proof-of-concept demonstration and Skeptics with reasons for debunking it. We could call it a draw. But that would also be too facile. The problems run deeper than a debate over a dataset. The debate itself is flawed. Each school of thought has too many conceptual degrees of freedom for neutralizing disagreeable findings. Each can stalemate debates over virtually any dataset. That is why we need an unusually long Discussion section that resets ground rules.
The Discussion section is indeed very long. Its gist is that this shows one example of forecasters doing well. It doesn’t seem to just be luck, because (for example) experts’ estimates were more mathematically coherent (eg the risk of a border conflict over 10 years should be higher than over 5), but it could have been partly luck. But this was a pretty easy task in various ways. If people disagree that this has relevance to real-world long-range forecasting, they should make specific testable claims about what would constitute the sort of real-world long-range forecasts that they think experts can’t do, and what would constitute a fair test of whether experts were able to do it. Then researchers can do adversarial collaborations to see whether experts can do those things.
I interpret this as: it’s tempting to treat this as Team Long-Range-Forecasting-Is-Possible Vs. Team No-It-Isn’t. But everyone agrees certain kinds of long-range forecasts are possible (I predict with high confidence that the US President in 2050 will not be a Zoroastrian) and others are impossible (I cannot begin to predict the name of the US President in 2050). People who consider themselves “believers” vs. “skeptics” about long-range forecasting should figure out the exact boundary of which cases they disagree on. And then Tetlock et al can test those cases and figure out who’s right.
I don't care very much about the authority of rationalist prophets but I think you're making a mistake with the prophecy about the American president in 2050.
Parsis are alive and well and good at the sort of coalitional politics that could lead to one getting inaugurated as President if the occasion arises, and as America becomes more and more a rainbow democracy, the occasion is going to arise more and more
i'm so used to hearing satan/satanism and thinking, like, overeager nerds that really want to tell you about their epic kinky wiccan ttrpg session that it's bewildering to remember that a sizable portion of this country legit views the biblical satan as a real force that must be combatted.
like we've got dentists and little league coaches convinced that they're locked in a holy, spiritual battle when the biggest danger presented by someone in a baphomet t-shirt is that they're almost definitely gonna try to put you onto their etsy shop where they sell shitty resin dice sets.
#literally it's so jarring #esp when you're Jewish or trans or both #cause when they talk about 'satanists' they aren't really talking about the ex-christian wicca larper ttrpg etsy kinkster metalheads #they're talking about You and they believe you are literally a metaphysical evil that must be defeated #and the nerdy satanist folks' stunts- the fear generated beads off them like water off a duck but it plasters against trans & Jewish people #it's a very uncomfortable & dangerous game that is being played by purposely antagonizing these christians w satan imagery imo #like I Get that it can be funny to fuck with them & to own the imagery they project onto all lgbtq people #(& I'm not even like objecting to it in all instances & contexts) #but there are some thoughtless public performances by (cis white gentile)satanists--during this massive moral panic stoked by reactionaries #--that just feel like playing with fire while sitting in a pile of dry leaves & kindling #like fire is cool & okay to enjoy watching but please look around you first and see if anyone will be hurt before you start playing around
This seems like dubious respectability politics. I'm not sure how to format things here, so have some out-of-order points. Feel free to ask me questions if I'm not making sense.
Ex-Christians seem to often deal with significantly worse treatment from Christians than, say, I've received. People who [de]convert to minority [ir]religions are still religious minorities, and they're often religious minorities who don't have a community to lean on. Certainly I'd expect that (at least in the US) ex-Christians are more likely to have been forced to participate in religious services that went against their beliefs than never-Christians, though I could be wrong.
In many areas, being known to be LGBTQ is safer than being known to be kinky. I'm gay and kinky, and I'm a lot more circumspect about the kink than the sexual orientation.
Historically, TTRPG players did get their gaming supplies confiscated and called evil. There's a "Dungeons & Dragons controversies" article on Wikipedia, you can go find Jack Chick's tract Dark Dungeons, etc. Not super a thing these days, but some people were around then.
Also, just, trying to keep your head down so that an abusive group doesn't target anyone seems like a losing game. If they're mad and they want to target someone, they'll make up an excuse or find some case where one (1) person behaved badly. Telling everyone to stay quiet and stop being provocative doesn't seem likely to make you safer, just to make everyone else more afraid.
Also LMAO at the idea that ex-Christians playing around with Satan imagery results in no harm to themselves, but actually somehow backfires and ends up hurting Jewish people. Like what the fuck are you even talking about? What an incredibly stupid thing to say and believe. Perfect illiberal identitarian conservatism, destroying solidarity yet again with socially reactionary moral panics!
No, I think it makes sense. I don't think the problem is "illiberal identitarian conservatism". I think the problem is that there are some Jews who don't have much of a positive Jewish identity and take "Judaism" to mean, most of all, "Not Christian".
When you also have post-Christians forming a similar negative and resentful "Not Christian" identity as "Satanists", these two groups of people naturally have this one thing in common.
This is pleasant when they can stew in their mutual resentment of Christians and "play games", but, eventually, some Christians are going to notice the similarity too (and frankly some less resentful Jews, who are no fans of symbols of sin), the flaws in the alliance will become obvious and one possible way the symmetry will break is what you see above - the Satanist playing the game has taken it TOO FAR, and the Jew is the wise, ancient victim restraining the evil one.
This dynamic is not specifically Jewish. As I have said previously, I think it's a mistake to cede "Satanism" to the LaVeyanite fraternities, as most Satanists are "occultists" in the sense they do Satanic ritual practice in secret, alongside an exoteric Abrahamic religion. The average Satanist is the Christian who, in a moment of emotion, prays to the Devil to make a god-superego-dystonic wish come true, or who consults with a black magician, or lives a second secret Satanic life as a pederast, or many other such arrangements.
I would claim that the Jew in the alliance above is essentially performing the same kind of occult "Satanic" spiritual practice when they join in the resentment of a fraternal Satanist profaning God, and this sort of horrified fear of blowback is broadly the same fear that the occult Christian Satanist feels if his Satanism is exposed, or """actually works""".
Knife crime is such a weird, bullshit category. I mean, it should be obvious. As far as I know, no other country apart from the UK has a category like "knife crime". They may have a statistic about stabbings, sure. But they don't really make a big deal out of stabbing versus bludgeoning versus strangling or whatever way there is to kill people with household items.
The category of "knife crime" is either an amalgamation of junkie armed robberies, domestic violence, bar fights turned lethal, premeditated murder, and gang violence on the street, or it's a euphemism for gang violence on the street.
But if you try to solve "knife crime", and you are really trying to talk about gang violence, but what you are measuring is stabbings, then of course no single policing trick and no single community intervention is going to equally affect youth gangs, drug addicts, and wives stabbing their husbands.
Knife crime is an intractable problem because it's an intractable concept.
it's a good concept if what you want to do is keep British people unarmed. the nexus that connects all of these is "carrying a knife" which is the central "knife crime" that the police take seriously.
I don't think Pelagius denied that sin was a thing that bound you, just that you didn't need a special irresistable grace (as opposed to... normal grace) to escape it.
that said the whole grace thing has always ran whistled straight past me since I want it to be an argument between determinism & "free will" and it really isn't.
the pelagius pill is just not being bdsm horny about it
‘Quantum Field X3’ at the Guggenheim Bilbao by Hiro Yamagata (2003-4)
weird to imagine someone who doesn't know what bondage to sin is like
take the pelagius pill
what was the gospel they were selling, actually?
the bdsm part was the usual thing where they assume passersby have an understanding of what sin means, that it weights upon them terribly and assure them that jesus can get rid of them, if they just come up to the preacher man (nobody does because this is the public square, not a protestant church)
the magic power part was healing, greater than any doctor or medicine
I swear to god every Protestant denomination is called some shit like the New Reformed Holiness Church of God of Jesus Christ in the Trinity and they believe in
- the doctrine of No-Limits Degradation which says that the soul is transformed into a new and perfect servant by total submission to the bondage of God the Father
- the doctrine of Perfected Salvation which says that once you convert Jesus gives you the power to shoot lasers out of your eyes
today's competing street preacher bible belt moment was that the gospel they were selling -- this one -- did not seem appealing to me or likely to appeal to anyone except to the kind of person to whom it would appeal a lot, and i wonder how many of those left there are.
it's always weird that people feel comfortable enough to offhandedly reference the fact that they have servants but at least the fact that they do is immediate warning that they're about to say something fucking insane
hey man can you pretend to be my sweet, simple, stupid, sweet cleaning lady for a second. yeah it'll be easy just talk like consuela from family guy. okay thanks man this is gonna get me so much clout
people are happy to ventriloquise their children and their pets with "stupid yet wise" voices, so why not their servants.
if you didn't see that that "our drone turned on us because we were frustrating its murder wish" story was obviously a wargame rpg scenario and not something that in any sense actually happened, take it as a good opportunity to undo some of the psychic damage all the hype from people trying to sell LLMs has evidently done to you
dislike this very much. flowers don't do that unless they are VERY poisoned. they look like rot... terrible psychedelic vision...
most people are using the newer diversity pride flag now, with the chevrons, but I feel like the number using the intersex-inclusive variant has actually gone down. I assume this is not a calculated slight against intersex people but it's sort of funny; but then it's also sort of funny the extent to which the intersex-inclusive version gives them pride of placement over the whole flag. it's like those flags that have a little union jack in the corner
if I had to actually keep up with which flags you're supposed to use I'd find the displacement of the alphabet soup inclusivity politics onto the flag itself a bit tiring, but since I'm not, I think it's funny and we should go as far as possible with it. ultimately the pride flag should be like one of those coats of arms that combines 50 other coats of arms into a single thing
since the pride flag is the flag equivalent of saying "LGBTQIA2S+" or whatever, there should be another flag that's the equivalent of just saying "queer" as an umbrella term and I'm going to propose that it be a purple circle, like 🟣 but a bit more plum-coloured. the flag itself needs to be physically a circle though, that's the important thing. I don't know how you fly it, that's for you to figure out
that's a roundel. you fly them on aircraft
cock is such a faggy word now i don't think straight people can say it anymore. they have to say penis instead
Penis is flaccid, dick is hard, cock is inside of you.
some terrible faggot once tried to convince me that 'cock' was gay and 'dick' was straight and only achieved an exposure of his cathexes by this.
i feel like my fundamental break with like 90% of like, "orthodox rationalists" (so to speak) is that i think hyperbolic discounting is basically good actually, for uncertainty reasons. i think your uncertainty about distant events should increase so rapidly that even exponential effects quickly die out
in practice im all the way with you, but i always feel a little weird about it because big sweeping trends seem very predictable. like a caveman could make some very good bets based on "the population will increase" or "energy demands will increase". still seems like there oughta be more uncertainty but i can't reason my way into it
I'm not sure they could! I'm not sure how inevitable the modern world was from caveman times! Caveman times could have lasted way longer! Humanity could have gone extinct! With the info they had, even if they were perfect baysians, idk if they could have predicted this
i appreciate more and more as time passes, and as knowledge of the stone age grows, the survival of the term "caveman" to mean "the ancestors" in the full primitive mythic sense of containers of deep wisdom discovered much later, or just made up by the narrator, beings of world-creating power, containing everything already pre-existent in their balls, and "father did a big shit, threw it away in disgust and made the moon" tales.
you say "Yeah, I think an epipaleolithic guy of the Kebaran culture could plausibly make some good bets, looking at the wild cereals he's putting into his mortar one day, about the whole "history" thing" and you sound crazy, but you phrase it as "caveman could look at a stalk of emmer wheat and the mortar and pestle he just spent 10 science beakers to discover and see not only the Kingdom of Solomon, but Christ, the Crusades and the Seven Day War" and yes that sounds reasonable, that's how cavemen were.
In this case I think the intended reference is not mythic and more like The Flintstones: a cartoon character who dresses in skin pelts but otherwise reasons like a modern American and debates how to allocate Effective Altruism funds. The cutesy word tells the reader that the scenario is intended as a cute philosophy thought experiment and not as an anthropological exercise.
>they don't think hanna barbera was a great house of mythology working in this current
Casual reminder that thanks to the tabloid press, there is a significant chance that any given house in the UK contains what are now Category B indecent images of children, tucked away in a corner or scrunched up and used as insulation.
Let the record show that The Sun, Britain’s most prominent and well-circulated right-wing newspaper, is now allowing a man who, factually speaking, groomed a child for sex to use its front page to deny being a groomer:
the moral tone is very different - the 80s stuff is very libertine enjoyment. reader, you are a pervert and here are perversions for you!
this is much more neovictorian straitened enjoyment-through-disavowal. of COURSE the pervert denies he is a pervert, just as you, reader, must deny you are a pervert. you're not a pervert, of course.