maol

This is the poor man's World's Worst Website Ever.

I've got a copy of this :)

The False Memory Foundation did a lot of damage by convincing people that you can't forget and then remember traumatic events. Yes, some people were coerced by memory regression therapists into recalling increasingly unlikely and spurious memories. But many people avoid thinking about traumatic events because it's painful, or use distractions to avoid remembering them. Traumatic memories from childhood can be particularly difficult to understand and deal with because the trauma occurred at an early stage of psychological development.

Whenever I see some new pearl of wisdom from Mr Yudkowsky, I think, "Surely it can't be that plainly, baldly wrong. Surely he can't have it that twisted, but still speak with so much authority...." I'm no expert, but I know slightly more about trauma than I do about computer science, maths or formal logic and this seems so incorrect.

Surely trauma is defined as something that you learn from in your body, not your mind; from your subconscious, not your conscious. By their nature, people cannot understand the meaning of a traumatic experience the same way they can understand an abstract idea.

Does Yudkowsky think traumatic memories aren't different from other memories - but psychiatrists are just too self interested to expose this? That people could get over their traumatic memories - but they're just too dopey to do so without a helpful tweet from Eliezer Y? And while it's fairly trivial really, does he actually think that the general public are impressed and intimidated by X and Y variables, a concept most of us were introduced to when we were 12 or 13?

it's not a great slogan. In the summer of 2020 there was a mad rush to find a slogan that was radical enough to be credible but not too radical to be popular. It was a bodge.

Blockchain is a solution desperately in search of a problem.

I spent ages writing a comment that I accidentally deleted (>_>) so apologies if this is a bit too long:

I've read that a lot of violent urban crime in the US takes place in poor, majority-minority or majority-black neighbourhoods. Those neighbourhoods are "overpoliced and underprotected" areas where cops rarely respond to crime reports & rarely go unless they are conducting a raid in SWAT gear, & people rarely make crime reports either because they don't expect the police to do anything or expect them to make things worse if they do turn up.

Increase police funding, decrease police funding, it doesn't change the approach the police take to those neighbourhoods & it doesn't change the social, political or historic factors that determine the relationship between neighbourhoods and the police.

& re: defunding, surely a libertarian should understand that government money is not a bottomless bucket....Some (not all) cities facing budget issues have increased police funding while cutting mental healthcare, social services or other parts of the safety net. this has 2 effects

• 1. more people fall through the safety net, resulting in more crime. Poverty/adverse childhood experiences/untreated (mental) health problems => drug addiction & crime => traumatized, impoverished, addicted, parents who have to fight just to stay out of jail & keep custody of their kids => adverse childhood experiences as their kids grow up with absent, neglectful or bad parents &/or are farmed out to relatives, foster homes, shelters for homeless youth or juvenile detention with all the potential for abuse, trauma and induction into crime that those environments offer => the cycle continues. People talk about "virtuous spirals" in economics and sociology - well, this is the opposite.
• 2. Police become first responders to every social problem as funding for emergency services and social services are cut - some crisis lines also automatically call the police. Police appear at scenes of poverty, homelessness, overdose or illness where their training is basically useless & where all they can really do is put someone in a jail cell or give them a fine. Worse than that, because of the "thin blue line" mentality (& "killology" style training), police turn up heavily armed at scenes where someone is suicidal, in severe distress or just behaving strangely, believing that it is better for them to kill that person than to be injured themselves. In "overpoliced and underprotected" areas, cops come in heavily armed, wearing kevlar or swat gear, & act more like an occupying military than police. Disabled & mentally ill people - particularly disabled or mentally ill black people - have been brutalized and killed by the police in these areas because their difference is seen as a sign of danger by trigger-happy police. And people who are the subject of repeated callouts due to mental health issues, addiction or minor crimes are treated with contempt by cops. All coppers aren't bastards to everyone, all the time, but the people who see the most of them see the worst of them.

San Marino pre-date the EU and most of the nations in it - they claim to be the oldest republic in the world. The techbros don't have history on their side. Actually, moving en masse to a micronation like San Marino then taking control of the government and the media wouldn't be a bad way to get their libertarian/fascist paradise - it's what the Scientologists tried to do in Clearwater, Florida. The downside to creating your libertarian/fascist state is that you then have to live in it, though, and it sucks.

"fine tune mating preferences" eurgh, who let the evopsychs see this?

You're right. I don't know if the EU could actually stop Italy from creating an independent city-state within its borders - probably not. But TechTopia would have to either join the EU and submit to all the legal, financial and tax obligations.... or negotiate a trade deal with the EU from scratch.

Negotiations between the EU and Britain, which is an actual country that only has 1 EU land border, ended pretty badly for Britain. I can't imagine them even being considered for a tiny city-state with no resources that's entirely surrounded by another EU country. There are states in Europe that aren't in the EU, but they're either states that are trying to get into the EU or independently wealthy states like Norway and Switzerland that pre-date the existence of the EU and have negotiated agreements with them over the decades. Plus Italy would probably get punished by the European commission. I don't think they would have even considered it.

You get the impression they've done absolutely no groundwork on the places they want to set up their cities. I assume it's a scam and they don't actually have any intention of setting one up - but maybe that's being too generous.

The only place that going Nazi is a "justified" response to left-wing criticism is inside a Nazi's head. It's fucking Nazis. It's not even a good career move, because Nazis are shit friends who will try and pressure you into saying and doing the racist shit that they want you to say or do and they'll ditch you the minute you stop.

(I might be paraphrasing Folding Ideas here, I'm not sure)

The developers of these apps didn't use blockchain or crypto because they were the best way to build the app. They used blockchain and crypto because they love them and think everyone should be using them. In fact, the only reason these apps exist is to encourage people to use cryptocurrency.

So no, there are no examples.