Lambent_Cactus

Yeah, I liked the idea that it's asymmetrical. You use the VK to find replicants trying to pass as human, but to try to make sure they're sufficiently robotic you need something else. Which makes sense: the original VK would be easy to tank if you were _trying_ to act like a replicant.

And narratively I think it works amazingly. The idea of forcing someone to prove that they're sufficiently inhuman ... shudder.

Orders of the political police are backstopped by violence. I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing?

Either way, the head-shooting and the stake-burning are Scott Alexander's metaphors here, from the linked SSC post. As the severity, suddenness, and violence of the sanctions heretics actually face go down my intuitions about his Parable of Lightning start to change. Dial them all the way down to Damore's situation (private business terminating at-will employment, for repeated on-the-job behavior that creates HR problems, totally non-violent) and my intuitions flip entirely.

All the rhetorical work of the Parable is done by this false equivalence. That it falls apart when stated so plainly causes me at least to worry about the reliability of SSC's digressive style. What other unfounded assumptions slip through on mood affiliation when you're not disciplined enough to write straightforwardly?

The Eastern Bloc did ... kind of a lot of violent coercion? The penalty for jumping the Berlin Wall was not losing your job.

Most of his articles could be about a third as long with no loss in clarity. The meandering windups can be _rhetorically_ effective, especially when they appeal to the biases of the reader, as they appeal to mine. But they're not truth-directed, and often obscure weak or blindered reasoinng, as I think they do here.

I'm sure you could come up with a hypothetical prosocial falsehood, like "aliens assassinated JFK for petty reasons, but they're very vain and will destroy the Earth if word gets out." If you become President and learn the real story, you damn sure better stick to the script about the grassy knoll!

But I think it's also possible to have pro-social taboos, particularly if they're attempts to correct for some indefensible (but maybe cognitively appealing or historically convenient) past error.

So for example, imagine a society that long practiced infanticide against the neurodivergent, and state-backed violence, disenfranchisement, and murder against the merely socially awkward. After intense and often violent social struggle, this society now affords them (us) formal equality, but big gaps in wealth and power remain, and a revanchist minority (with a terrorist fringe) openly wishes for a return of the old ways.

That society might develop strong taboos against "just asking questions" about whether shy people really had it so bad, or whether society should worry about whether they're treated fairly, or whether there isn't some innate biological difference that accounts for their relative lack of success. That would probably be a good thing!

There's some amount of epistemic deadweight loss you would happily accept to be extra guarded against backsliding on the core ethical commitments. You might even come out ahead epistemically, where there would otherwise be strong but subtle cultural biases, pressures of ideological convenience, and cognitive-scientific artifacts around in-groups and out-groups that make _false_ claims about the shy, awkward, or neurodivergent more appealing than the objective facts merit.

The problem with signing up with an underground Straussian heretic network is that if you're not actually beset by the Inquisition or by Stalinism, you're likelier to trap yourself in an epistemic filter bubble than to discover some secret truth.

Damore wasn't burned at the stake or shot in the head; he was fired from one especially cushy software job at a giant, publicly-traded company. And rather than grappling with the effects his memo might have had on such a complex environment, or even sticking to pursuing the empirical facts about his claims, he decided to pursue a career as a right-wing micro-celebrity, only engaging with conservative activists and alt-right trolls. And he's been stuck there ever since, with his fellow culture warriors clapping each other on their backs about what brave heretics they are, instead of getting back to building anything interesting.

I seems like a lot hinges on "The identities of the bullies is well known."

The President's letter says "If those students who issues the threats can be identified, they will be subject to appropriate disciplinary sanction." Have the threateners been reliably identified in, for example, press accounts? It seems very possible that in some communities on campus "everyone knows who it is" without the administration actually knowing, or being able to reliably prove, who it was.

The tooling system was ok even then, but core development seemed listless. Vitalik gave a keynote at a conference I went to and talked about why it was actually good for the ecosystem that he and all the core contributors spent all their time traveling to conferences.

Since then, transactions per day on the network have doubled, but gas costs are up 10X in gwei and some truly ludicrous multiplier in dollars. I suspected then that the switch to Proof of Stake and other scaling fixes was the fusion power of ETH, always six months away, and that concern looks really vindicated.

Oh yeah, a proper great power could snuff out Bitcoin, to say nothing of the smaller coins, if they put their mind to it.

If there's a real non-bubble use case, it will have to be around making a bad but much less expensive version of something that's already possible offline, but that requires lots of lawyers to set up.

Picture of new CEO Bryan Crowley looks like a parody. And this line!

> First of all, I want to take a moment to say hello and thank you to all of our Soylent friends out there who have helped turn Rob’s vision into one of the most talked about and fastest growing brands in the food and beverage industry!