@ConceptualJames I remember the ‘90s. There was a persistent and ultimately successful propaganda campaign against the idea of civil liability in mainstream news publications.

https://x.com/robinhanson/status/1498805471322394624

@ConceptualJames The big movies of 1999 were expressions of desperation at the false bourgeois we’d constructed to replace the real one - Office Space, Fight Club, American Beauty, and The Matrix, which spookily resembled the Columbine High School massacre.

@benlandautaylor Easier test to start with: Are you complicit in the continued marginalization of the dissidents who were proven right in 1956? 🧵

https://x.com/ben_r_hoffman/status/1916482424676008402

@benlandautaylor Daniel Ellsberg is a more recent case: positive halo but the information he offered hasn’t been robustly admitted into public discourse.

@ConceptualJames @ThisDayinCovid You said “no one” and that’s clearly false. @ConceptualJames @ThisDayinCovid What’s true is that canonical American discourse refused to acknowledge that information - marginalizing articulate dissidents like Ayn Rand - until the Soviet premier acknowledged it.

@QiaochuYuan I was generating the categories on the fly, and the sequence was a bit haphazard, so I thought a bit about how to make it more analytically obvious. @QiaochuYuan The extractor receives either a current resource, or a belief about the value of future resources.

@ESYudkowsky Malice is an attractor in systems of asymmetric social power because it reduces motive ambiguity: benjaminrosshoffman.com/civil-law-and-… @ESYudkowsky Anglo countries are declining from a 300 year liberal golden age that began during the English Civil War: benjaminrosshoffman.com/calvinism-as-a…

@johnsonmxe “perhaps it feels transgressive to ask for room service”

I think more likely her experience taught her that if she tried to talk to the person on the phone in a relatively natural relaxed way they’d fail to complete the transaction & possibly get scared or angry at her. @johnsonmxe Lots of ways to trigger people if you’re not spending lots of cognition tracking a fine-grained subtle threat-dance-ritual.

Have things actually gotten this bad? (🧵) How recently were they better? My impression as a child was definitely not that America was like this, but the realtor I tried to find a rental through in New Haven failed to show us the first few planned viewings.

https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1695507167963656340

I ended up finding a place via Craigslist, which despite the many scams still seems like the best option. The second best option was traversing local reputation networks.

Excellent example of the social construction conflating maleness, sexual agency, cleverness, and propensity to assault someone: lesswrong.com/posts/RxxqPH3W… The treatment of my replies is a good example of why I don't bother with LessWrong much anymore.

On “anarchism”, IDK about isms and identity labels, but what I do know is: 🧵 A person can have policies. A pecking order with territory is usually not a person. In exceptional cases like Louis XIV, Peter the Great, Stalin, Napoleon, or Mao, it is.

We’d need a concrete idea what we care about to measure how IQ predicts it. If we experimented using metrics like calorie yield per sq foot in a randomly assigned community garden allotment, or the HRV of a toddler you’ve taken care of for 3 hours, I’d expect nonlinearity.

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1662913641627410433

Specifically, I guess @nntaleb is right that in US, IQ<80 starts meaning you’re improbably bad at simple puzzles for someone ok in the head at all, and higher becomes a more culturally specific, specialized metric, and I’d expect the nonlinearity to track.

Newborns rapidly switch from very strongly resembling one person to very strongly resembling another by changing their facial expression in response to a change in intention, which suggests facial physiognomy is mostly psychosomatic. Consistent with my experience with Mewing. If you meet someone whose expressions can change even a tenth as freely as those of a baby, you have met a person of exceptional behavioral range. Such are the ones who walk between worlds, including worlds yet unknown. Such are the ones who can do something new.

@CurziRose Here's my attempt to precisely specify a specific important type of trauma. Generally I think that if a word isn't quite right it's because the concept isn't quite right, or because there is a compulsion to get it wrong on purpose. benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-trauma-cou… @CurziRose The exact term for this type of trauma might be "unjust world hypothesis" or "authoritarian submission": edge.org/response-detai…

Watched Cronenberg's Dead Ringers and eXistenZ with @jessi_cata and @umbersorrow, and I understand much better how from a monotheistic perspective atheism can look like nihilism. 🧵 Speech - and reference more generally - emerges for and is learned in the context of intersubjective thinking, not private reason. benjaminrosshoffman.com/language-power…

@KBULTRA0 @DreamDionysian This is still obscuring the main thing that happened, which is that during the wars the aristocratic class borrowed a lot of gold from the creditor class to spend on war stuff, which created jobs for clients. @KBULTRA0 @DreamDionysian This created a strong political faction in favor of preserving war jobs, which made deflation politically unpopular and created a political mandate for redefining all contracts denominated in gold to refer to funny money controlled by aristocrats and their clients.

@metaLulie I don't think normies are doing what they're doing deliberately or consciously, and I do think they're doing what they're doing out of fear. Threatening people who aren't unconsciously controlled by fear is how this pattern propagates itself. Related:

https://twitter.com/ben_r_hoffman/status/1388977790469484548

@metaLulie Also - glad to hear I'm managing to communicate more effectively than before. I've had a lot of high-quality bodywork done recently that seems to have made this a lot easier.

@metaLulie There are many different kinds of people. We hear about and from suburban middle-class people ("normies") a lot because a lot of our shared stories about what is going on are about them. @metaLulie Microeconomically rational agents with similar beliefs and preferences will usually act similarly, and a statistical normal can emerge from this. But sometimes the details of a situation mean that the best thing to do looks very unusual.

Antivax position: Even the FDA agrees the vaccine approval process is shoddy enough to let something dangerous through.
Provax position: FDA decisions are political, not scientific. When the state says so, we gotta inject ourselves with something that makes us feel ill. Health!

https://twitter.com/ben_r_hoffman/status/1382774015597633538

I hold the declinist provax opinion that most likely the vaccines are safe and effective, but most people are not in an epistemic position to assess this, and society is no longer capable of building the sorts of institutions that deliver safe effective vaccines.

Statistics about the worst-off can only explain their bad life outcomes if rules are reliably enforced. Otherwise, statistical descriptions of the behavior of the poor could just as easily be descriptions of the good behavior for which they are being punished, or lies. Structural racism comes from the selective enforcement of rules on the basis of what feels like a normal outcome, so that existing power relations, not the rules, actually control behavior.

2 modern ideologies: cybernetics & game theory, i.e. macroeconomics and microeconomics, unseeing each other. Keynesian cybernetics systematically extends credit to too-big-to-fail, causing secular increase in relative frequency of Moral Mazes.

Ideology: Changes in treasury bond yield affects availability of credit via opportunity cost.
Mechanical explanation: Changes in treasury bond yield affects availability of credit via the market value of banks' capital reserves.
🧵 Lower Yield, Higher Price

Simple bond: an IOU for $10 in a year. If I buy it for $8 now, then it's as though it will go up in value by 25% in a year, so the effective yield is 25%, the same as if I bought an $8 bond paying 25% interest.

@HiFromMichaelV @wolftivy N is a white woman who's worked for 10+ years in credit unions, currently working on a project to expand access to credit for formerly incarcerated people. @HiFromMichaelV @wolftivy In our first conversation, I pointed out the difference between credit scores as self-fulfilling prophecies about people's ability to roll over their debts based on future access to credit, and underwriting loans based on fundamentals.