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Why would anyone choose to do inbetweens on someone else's cartoon, when they have no financial or occupational obstacles to just working on their OWN cartoon? Animation takes dozens or hundreds of people to do to current quality and a lot of it is a really shit job to get stuck with.

The same goes for things like toys and collectables. Who is going to CHOOSE to make someone else's dolls all day when anyone with the skill or the talent is 100% fo the kind of person who would just be making their OWN dolls in miniscule batches.

Remove employment from the equation and I just don't see any reason why ANYONE would do large entertainment projects at current scale. And even if they did, most of them would crumble under the fact that the entire workforce can and will just leave at any possible moment, right?

There was not a lot of discussion of "what if the markets become about what word will the president say at a teleprompter."

The fact that the "true price" of the market would only be revealed 0.5 seconds before closing time as harried government employees scrambled to get their stablecoin transfers locked in was, honestly, an episode of real naivete from the early proponents. In their defense, they envisioned the tool as you say as being structured: controlled by deft hands, designed by thinkers for thinkers, with rules that encouraged their goal of knowledge production. But that is only a partial defense, as these were also the same people moving at breakneck speeds into crypto DeFi start-ups and wringing their hands about the tyranny of financial regulations. It was pretty perfectly predictable that the world they were asking to build their tool would use it to feed the mutual demand of grifters for marks and of marks for the illusionary hobby of being a grifters.

I can't find the specific post I was thinking of, but I remember at one point he responded to specifically one of the actual cases of Trump admin insider trading with "this is good, the price is now more accurate". For a similar one, he remarks here that political staffers betting on their own campaigns is fine, and manipulating prices is good.

prediction markets exist within the free-market-maximalist / ancap ideology of "if it is good, the market will supply it; if it is bad, the market will punish it". so if a prediction market is crooked, and people still use it, then plausibly it should be providing some value, or else no one would use it. a prediction market which was better at creating information and preventing insider trading should outcompete a bad prediction market.

You don’t hear “politics is the mind killer” as a refrain quite so often these days, and there‘s been some great analysis about the (real) weaknesses of that particular maxim.  But I do think that it was and is an important part of the ratspace secret sauce.  As time goes on, I’m getting more and more used to seeing people sort of… drop off, in a particular way.  They stop being as interesting, stop thinking as clearly, express more anger and less curiosity.  I’ve been half-jokingly calling it ‘Twitter poisoning,’ although that‘s way too narrow a diagnosis.  But its (relative) absence in these parts is more precious to me now than ever.

If we have half-retired “politics is the mind killer,” one thing I’ll try to keep in my own head is a related (if a bit softer) warning along the lines of: ”you can’t think about your enemies too often without becoming a warrior.”  Causal, not just tautological.  And when warriors fight nations, they become something else.  When our enemies are classes, demographics, or political parties, we’re not just warriors any more- we’re soldiers.

The particular failure mode I see doesn’t come from proposing solutions to political problems, thinking hard about political systems, or even arguing for partisan ideas as such.  It‘s that pivot where it stops being about the ideas, stops being about the goals, and where the most real thing about the struggle is the people you’re doing it against.  You know what I mean, I think- we’ve all seen those particular political spaces where every third post or comment is about Them.  What fraction of us, when we read about some human rights violation or tragedy, immediately ask ourselves whether it will give us rhetorical power over our enemies, or vice versa?

That’s wartime thinking, straight up.  Making war is not an absolute moral failure, mind you.  Sometimes politics really is an existential, overriding concern, and sometimes the tragic existence of soldiers is justified.  But it doesn’t stop being tragedy.  Even when combat is mostly nonlethal, it still represents a colossal loss of intelligence and effort to zero-sum contests.  And one of the quintessential things about warriors is, they tend to start wars.

That’s the thing, right?  The fundamental, game-theoretical, catch-22 fuck of it all.  The reason to have soldiers is because They have soldiers, and might start a war.  And if They don’t have soldiers, then by gum we should get some and tell ‘em to start a war on our terms because we’ll definitely win it.  That’s the cold reality of what happens as your enemies become more and more salient: conflict becomes your reality, and you will become a part of the ritual that summons that conflict.  The strife you embody will have many uses for your human intelligence- it’ll reward cleverness, maybe even artistry of a sort.  But it will not be generative; it will take much from us, and give nothing.

The soldier’s counter-argument is: but they have soldiers.  And the soldier’s argument is correct.  But the soldier’s argument doesn’t tell you how to feel about that double-bind.  And what I say to the soldier’s argument is: okay, but we need to cultivate a hatred for war.  Actually, really, hate it.  Not ostentatiously, but in our bones.  Not the way we hate email, but the way we hate death.  Let it be vile, disgusting, small.  And even more so, if you yourself are a warrior.

This is not a call for centrism.  I am an extremist in some ways, in step with the partisan conflicts of my times in some ways, grossly out of step with them in others.  Transhumanism is a hell of a drug, politically speaking.  It is, sort of, an argument for liberalism and maybe federalism, since those things have a way of making politics less existential, more often.  But mostly I think it’s an argument in favor of the things that liberalism and federalism make possible- the opportunity to let your philosophy become your way of living, and to let the consequences of that life demonstrate, without coercion, the virtues of your philosophy.

I find that the game of go is a pretty useful metaphor for these things.  In go, there’s a concept called ‘sente’, which means something vaguely along the lines of ‘initiative’.  But in go it’s especially important, because the board itself is so wide open- you can play almost anywhere, do almost anything you want.  The opposite of sente is ‘gote’, being in a position where you’re forced to respond to what your opponent is doing or else face catastrophe.

To ‘have sente’ is to be able to look across the board as a whole, and decide the future of that field.  Do you want to calmly build a framework for your future territories?  Start an invasion?  Probe your opponent’s strategy?  It’s your call.  To be in gote, by contrast, means constantly making the best of a situation you didn’t choose- scrabbling to defend against that invasion, or push back against their expanding lines.  If you can find a move on the board that absolutely forces your opponent to respond to you, or risk losing the game, that move has sente.   This is such an important dynamic that very good players will often make huge sacrifices, just to ‘take sente’, to grab the initiative.

So if you ask anybody at the top of the go world what their thinking process is like, they’ll say the first question they always ask, when their opponent places a stone, is this: “Does that move have sente?”  Or to put it a different way, “is my response to this action more important than the other things I could be doing instead?”  This is not the same as asking, “Will my opponent profit if I play away from this area?”- your opponent most certainly will.  But a good player knows when to close the gap by contesting that move, and when to go looking for something else to do instead.

By contrast, weak players often play “puppy go”, in which they will inevitably respond to their opponent again, and again, and again, voluntarily abandoning sente- they reason that if there can only be one winner on this board, then their victory must follow from thwarting their opponent’s every move.  So they follow you around the board (like a puppy!), constantly fighting the battles you want them to fight, on the terms that you set, in the directions that serve your interests.  Sometimes, just for fun, I’ll let people playing puppy go win every battle, just to see their surprise when they add up the tally at the end and realize they lost the game.

We very much live in the era of ‘puppy politics’, in which the mere existence of a conflict induces more and more engagement.  If They move, then we have to move too!  Every week there’s a new explosion, with almost no discrimination about whether that’s a fight that’s even worth having.  In a given week, it’s anyone’s guess whether we’ll be fighting about voter suppression (a topic at the bedrock of the republic) or about culture war subjects with limited direct scope, but which seem important as symbols or as contributions to the Overton Window.

Being a good soldier means knowing when to give your opponent exactly what They ask for.  Even though that victory will be real for Them, even though the loss will hurt.  Because the alternative is allowing Them to set the agenda and decide where your effort and wealth will be spent- over, and over, and over again.  If you become the sort of person who leaps reflexively towards the nearest engagement, addicted to conflict for conflicts’ sake, without ever asking What else could I be doing?, What does the world look like after I win?, Is this the best way to claim the territory I want?, then you’re not just making the war larger and more real and more damaging- you’re also doing your own goals a disservice.

why it's repugnant is that it's not true that wars are won by those who deserve to win. history is written by the victors, no more and no less.

to fight a war is to insist that it must be a war, that no negotiation, neutrality, or concession can be made. to fight a war is to believe that your enemy should lose, be exterminated, or accept total surrender.

we like to celebrate world war 2, because the allies defeated the nazis totally. germany totally renounces nazism and today nazis are (mostly) repudiated and shunned. in the mainstream discourse, it is the platonically Good And Virtuous War.

not to suggest that a Good War cannot exist, but clearly the desire to venerate Good Wars comes from our deepest psychology of how we wish to see ourselves and our culture. what is our canonical example of the Good Surrender? not their Good Surrender, your Good Surrender? what's our canonical War That Was Prevented By Negotiation and Trust? what's the canonical War Where We Showed Restraint? what's the canonical Deal Where We Shared Power and Resources To Our Allies?

Maybe because the military has a pretty diverse reach and employs a huge number of people.

“in the past women didn’t get education” VS “in the past, men stopped women from getting education and excluded them from all cultural spheres”.

“muslim women must wear hijab” VS “muslim men force muslim women wear hijab”.

“in this country, abortion is illegal” VS “men in this country made women getting abortion illegal”.

Addiction isn't a disease, it's a treatment.

I'm not an addict because I came down sick with a hankering for substances, because they're fun. I was traumatized and then dropped into a society that makes survival extremely hostile. The substances are a pillow and blanket. They're a warm mug and being held tightly by a friend. They're an invitation to a seat by the fire when the storm is raging outside the doorstep.

Addicts aren't sick with addiction, we're sick with so much chronic stress and pain that we're crumbling under the weight. Many of us since we were children with no tools for coping.

And yes I've been thinking of my beloved experiment, rat park, this whole time.

yeah, there is a danger of medicalizing mental health patients, rather than seeing their thoughts and behaviors as rational responses to their circumstances; and treatment of addiction should always include treatment of comorbidities and analysis of their circumstances (which any competent therapist should do). on the other hand, saying addiction is caused by "living in a dying world" 1. cuts off curiosity about what else is causing your addiction, and 2. is unfalsifiable-- we all live in the same "dying world" and there's little that one individual can do about that, so you can't isolate the effect of "the world" on the addiction any more than you can attribute the addiction to the day being 24 hours long.

I wonder whether it will work.

I expect that people will flee en masse once they realize that it's happening, but that's what I would do. I want people and AI to be segregated, not mixed: if I want to talk to an AI, that's what I'll go do, if I want to post something to social media, I'll do it with the expectation that real people will see it and like it, or possibly argue me to death about it, or ignore it. But it will be real people doing it, and that's important to me.

I'm not sure I know how other people think.

Some people are just lonely. I can imagine my dad making a post and smiling at the immediate replies, even if he knows on some level that this is not real. There's a part in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics where he talks about how you can make a person see a face with just a circle, a line, and two dots:

And I do think that social media can be like this too, that the average person will read humanity into even short replies from AI that's clearly marked as AI. If there's a cast of recurring characters in your posts, if they have some rough texture to them, if you have even a chance of clucking your tongue, smiling, and saying "oh Jenn" at a post shat out by the "slightly kooky middle-aged woman who believes in crystals" AI personality Meta has decided you need in your life ...

I think it's a path to a dying platform, but I'm really not sure about that. Maybe some social media platforms will just evolve to be something else, a place where you get your cure for social isolation, where everyone understands you, where you can "win" every conversation, where no one pushes back very hard. They think you're funny and insightful and attractive. Maybe people don't care about "real" very much.

Harris wins in most of the countries that are asked (35 out of 46). Trump wins in 10: Bulgaria, Georgia, Hungary, Iraq, Israel, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia, Serbia, and Slovenia. I found conflicting polls for Slovakia. Any other countries with polling data that I'm missing?