catchclose8919 (u/catchclose8919)

catchclose8919 commented on Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash fiod.nl/arrest-of-suspect... · Posted by u/langitbiru

dannyw · 3 years ago

For those who think this is good:

Private keys can be represented in text. Like this: KwTHJw865SLeTAjK7otYb5bL5mwutBb2vDxxF7kGf5XvY7QttnvM

Encrypted messaging apps like Matrix or Signal, can be used to send strings with private keys, anonymously.

It's very difficult to hold a position that financial privacy tools are bad, but encrypted messaging apps are good; because they are really not that different.

catchclose8919 · 3 years ago

Ppl work hard to make sure they remain different for 99.9% of non-technical people (eg. banning anonimous cryptocurrency)... once this is done, you become and outlier by using different tools than average people, and special means of surveilance can be deployed against you personally at much lower cost...

Ofc this is bad, but the bigger purpose is always "power over the proles".

You can let most people have most of their privacy as long as you don't touch the "power distrubution tools" (money) - eg. if messaging is private, but money is on a blockchain where all wallets are mandatory to have an associated human identity, it doesn't matter that some sketchy transactions happen on the edges. Bitcoin would be targeted too if it were used to eg. pay wages and fund companies on a large scale.

Probably Tornado Cash enabled some activity that was large scale enough to not be considered just "on the fringes" anymore...

catchclose8919 commented on Against Discipline irinadumitrescu.substack.... · Posted by u/robtherobber

closedloop129 · 3 years ago

>What if the moment our better self suggests an early bedtime or a lap in the pool or writing a poem, it starts to sound like a scolding parent telling us what we ought to do. So we become a little like a stubborn child, asserting our independence by digging in and not moving.

It's Freudian psychology [1] that adults are the ones who have integrated their super-ego into their ego. If there is a separation between 'self' and 'better self', then the development doesn't seem to be finished.

Like the author, I don't like to do the stuff that the better self suggests. I can trick myself to follow the better self with discipline or by gamifying the task, but I don't know how to overcome the separation and make those tasks 'mine'.

Does anybody know how to do the integration?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyche_(psychology)#Freudian_s...

catchclose8919 · 3 years ago

> then the development doesn't seem to be finished

It's never finished, that's the point, if you want to keep growing the a part of you must separate a bit and drag itself towards the better possible future, then later drag the other lump of you either gently or kicking and screaming. But this "non integration" seems to be the "engine for growth". Even our society as a whole embraces a similar mechanism to "force growth".

You can have integration and comfort, but... you'll need to oursource the growth and suffering that comes with it (think of the billionaines chillin' and vibin' while striving engineers and tormented artists do the real work towards the betterment of humanity). That's kind of the sad truth, some need to be non-integrated and under some amount of suffering for the wheels to keep turning.

catchclose8919 commented on Productivity porn calebschoepp.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/triplechill

catchclose8919 · 3 years ago

meh, strive for CLARITY instead: figure out what really needs most to be done, understand more about what you're doing, do less but have a larger impact!

catchclose8919 commented on Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply docs.google.com/document/... · Posted by u/SirTechnocracy

sim1collins · 3 years ago

"Unpredictably far away"—nice way of putting it.

Whether we "need" humans depends on where one's values are; for those who would like humans in some form to continue to exist, the idea of AGI making humans obsolete isn't terribly comforting. Even those who might really like the idea of humans sort of evolving into AI (and eventually ceasing to biologically exist) might not be keen to rush toward human obsolescence if they're not thrilled with initial versions of AGI (diversity and optionality is nice).

catchclose8919 · 3 years ago

I only care about makind sure that all essential and valuable human characteristics, perspective, thought patterns and values get carried on to whatever the next thing is :) Extinction of bio-humans can be perfectly fine if it happens without information loss imo.

EDIT+: Counterintuitively, it might be more benefficial to have way more people in the (maybe short) era before the passing of bio-humans, to increase the probability that as many as possible of the valuable human ideas get passed on to our AGI descendents! If AGI is finally achieved by eg. "three middle aged white guys surviving some apocalypse in some bunker", then that AGI will only have and carry on the values and mindsets of those "three middle aged white guys"!!! Ironically, "unification under one umbrella of AGI research efforts" like eg. OpenAI folks try to do increase the likelihood the "three middle aged white guys fathering a narrow-minded AGI", instead of encouraging a diversified competition landscape...

We seem to be handling the upcoming birth of AGI just as well as we "handled" this pandemic...

catchclose8919 commented on Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply docs.google.com/document/... · Posted by u/SirTechnocracy

jtbayly · 3 years ago

I was not replying to the document, but to catchclose8919's comment where he advocated "handing extra child care support to educated people in helthy societies and contraception to the others."

catchclose8919 · 3 years ago

"Handling contraception" is almost zero cost (so can even be done in bad economie where stuff like child support can't work) and is about choice, not forcing anyone to do anything!

If you want to play the "contraception is eugenics" card, have fun with whatever ultra-cristian uneducated mid-american audience you find for that...

catchclose8919 commented on Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply docs.google.com/document/... · Posted by u/SirTechnocracy

jtbayly · 3 years ago

Ah yes, the old “More from the fit, less from the unfit” view of reproduction. Where “fit” of course is “like me.” There’s a long history of this sort of eugenics.

catchclose8919 · 3 years ago

It's eugenics when you force it. It's social engineering when you alter the incentives/rewards landscape to get better outcomes. And it's... evolution when nature does it anyway.

Just labeling it as generically "bad" and charicaturising it in a way that bundles it with other despicable tendencies like maybe racism brings no insight to the discussion. Only muddies the waters and makes the whole discussion stupider.

catchclose8919 commented on Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply docs.google.com/document/... · Posted by u/SirTechnocracy

simonsarris · 3 years ago

> ...maybe if didn't work so hard to make our socity into a hypercompetitive hellhole intelligent and educated people would also start having more children!

If they're so educated and intelligent, why don't they opt out of that?

catchclose8919 · 3 years ago

...bc (1) educated != intelligent, and (2) intelligence is highly multidimensional, maybe the "dumb" people are the ones more intelligent in the dimension of intelligence requiring to "figure out they should opt out".

Also, in general very vey few people are "meta-socially intelligent" and the few that are are semi-psychopaths in positions of power so they probably enjoy the hell out of riding this hellish social machine.

catchclose8919 commented on Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply docs.google.com/document/... · Posted by u/SirTechnocracy

sim1collins · 3 years ago

While this argument makes intuitive/emotional sense, it's not the case that humans start having more kids once they can finally "chill t f out"—though I totally understand where you're coming from.

In practice, populations in actual hypercompetitive hellholes, where they're not just competing for a job/status/basic financial solvency, but literally for their food security, physical safety, etc., are those which are having more kids.

The pretty-much-universal trend appears to be that once people become more educated and comfortable, they stop having kids above repopulation rate.

All that said, we are not arguing in favor of making life more stressful for any group, be they in developed nations or nations facing severe hardship. We're simply pointing out that "make raising kids cheaper/easier" and "make life easier" are not interventions proven to boost birth rates.

catchclose8919 · 3 years ago

> populations in actual hypercompetitive hellholes, where they're not just competing for a job/status/basic financial solvency, but literally for their food security, physical safety, etc., are those which are having more kids

That's the problem we should solve. We don't want just "more children". We want "more children in the environments where there are resources available for their proper development". The "more children" in places like you describe problem is currently solved by more polytical instability, more war, more disease etc..

> "make raising kids cheaper/easier" and "make life easier" are not interventions proven to boost birth rates

Nothing's proven until you run an experiment to f prove it! You're the perfect example of "thinking prfoundly, but in the wrong direction" - under the whole flawed paradigm of "social science" you take the problems to be solved as "implacable natural tendencies" and from this you build flawed arguments against why the actual problems to be solved "can't be solved".

> The pretty-much-universal trend appears to be that once people become more educated and comfortable, they stop having kids above repopulation rate.

That's the freakin problem you need to solve, not a "trend" to placidly observe. We need to run experiments on multiple ways to alter/reverse this human behavior that's not natural but a product of the nasty society we've build for ourselves. OK, it was a price for a faster evolution towards post-industrial stage, but now we can tweak it and adjust the externalities.

We might want to start with the fact that people are rarely "educated and comfortable". Education often makes people slaves of social-loops where they need to work harder to keep the higher status they've got used to and so on. Most higher educated people are more stressed and less happy than lower education people. We need to give people stuff like "job tenures" etc. to create stability - the lower class people actually have this stability by virtue of being "rock bottom", eg. "it's hard to fall any lower down the social ladder, so at least you can lay back and feel good and comfy about it, with whatever rationalizations you can concoct, then start having some kids to get a feel of meaning in life, yey!".

We need to think active social engineering not passive social-"science". We've sold ourselved a bunch of feel good stories about "how things are" in our "society", instead of realizing that society is nothing but a mechanism with thousands of levers we can start tweaking until we get better outcomes...

catchclose8919 commented on Likely cause of mystery child hepatitis outbreak found bbc.co.uk/news/health-612... · Posted by u/iamben

yonaguska · 3 years ago

Scientists and doctors that warned about the health costs of lockdowns on children were cancelled. We really need to set up a Ministry of Ministry of Truth. /s

On a serious note, can we ask how we got here? Why were lockdowns so unquestionably pushed?

> No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them. However hard it had been to get the fifteen-day shutdown approved, getting another one would be more difficult by many orders of magnitude.

Dr Birx from her book.

But she's far from the only one to blame.

catchclose8919 · 3 years ago

> can we ask how we got here?

- most people have a stupid bias towards "doing something, anything, doesn't matter if it doens't work"

- politicians and "thought leaders" and "experts" amplify this bias to bewildering extents of stupidity (mostly for selfish reasons, is something goes wrong and they "did nothing" they destroyed, if they do something wrong but it was "the established best thing to do at the time" they can just say "oops, we were wrong, but now we've learned from it, we all learn from our mistakes and grow")

- so we get the shitshow we have/had!

And doing some simple experiments to establish faster that eg. masks work was only very very late done - "not a priority to do stupid pseudo-science pseudo-experiments now, let our scientists focus on the important things".

Our effor to "control" (lockdown) or "prioritize" (oh no, there won't be any masks left for healthcare workers if everyone buys them) or "efficientize" ("let's not have thousands of independent vaccines and do wasteful overlapping studies") or "be ethical" (oh now, forget that we have ~100k pople offering themselves as volunteers for proper but faster vaccines testing, we can't just put them at risk to accelerate the process) turned everything to shit.

It's kind of obvious that if we want antifragility towards pandemic we need less-coordinated responses, more divergent thinking and more organically-organized common sense approaches even when the evidence for them is still lacking.

...instead we picked the technocratic-authoritarian playbook and our plan for a potential future even worse pandemic is to double down harder on the same path (wtf).

catchclose8919 commented on Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply docs.google.com/document/... · Posted by u/SirTechnocracy

catchclose8919 · 3 years ago

...maybe if didn't work so hard to make our socity into a hypercompetitive hellhole intelligent and educated people would also start having more children! Give people guranteed free life-time education from daycare to university + some standard of free universal healthcare (sure, you'll have to pay for your antiaging, but not for a broken leg!) and more people will enjoy having more children. Maybe engineer the world so that people who choose to "chill t f out" can still enjoy both wealth and security because we do generate surplus value no matter what some people want to make you think. Just prevent some people from overconsuming at the same time that we prevent other from overproducing and give social climbing advantages to less competitive and workaholic people.

One reason why I'm 100% for a mildly-socialistic world government thinggy putting some brakes on mindless growth and eavening things out - handing extra child care support to educated people in helthy societies and contraception to the others. Instead we have a global kabal that manufactures scarcity all over the place, and wars in some even less lucky places, and instead of family planning we have... wars, disease & famine. No idea why we've made these tradeoffs as a species!

Some of the "economical and technological growth" in our societies and economies is really not the right kind of growt (it's more like "cancerous growth"), and some mild redistribution plus hitting the breaks a bit would allow for a more thoughtful type of development so that we can handle safely the transmission of human intelligence and values to bio-humanity's descendents when that comes sooner or later...