The Dems have never called themselves leftist. They are quite eager to point out that they are the Neoliberal party: “We’re capitalist, and that’s just the way it is,” - Nancy Pelosi.
Unfortunately, when you've got 2 choices, one being "Let's round up the pinkos" and the other being "Nothing will fundamentally change", the actual Leftists have to choose the lesser of two evils.
That is a perfectly workable definition of socialism. Literally textbook. I would expect any red-blooded Leftist to agree with the statement "The means of production belong in the hands of the proletariat", or they're just fucking posers.
Please, Mister or Missues Vanguard of Leftist Vocabulary, enlighten us on what "Socialism" really means.
I think you fell for the typical right wing propaganda trope where socialism=marxism=communism. You presented the textbook definition of that propaganda and of communism.
This is the “propaganda” sponsored by most leftists, though?
Except not equality - stepping stones. Socialism is supposed to lead to communism, per Marx. That’s not a right wing take, unless you consider Karl Marx a conservative.
Communists call leftists "reformists", that think you can reform capitalism into a stable state (like i do). If you rest there, you are not a communist but a socialist, so its not a stepping stone.
I mean, those of us with Marxian biases define it that way -- not right wingers -- and see "social democrats" in the 21st century as being the people who successively turned the term to mean instead anything-where-government-does-stuff. That's effectively what it came to mean in the US.
Notably, the definition given by Marx and other 19th century socialists (worker controlled production) is doesn't even have to involve government or the state at all. It just came to mean that once proximity to power came into play. The "soviet" word merely meant local worker councils, not a state form, for example. But once the Bolsheviks took state power, the power of the actual soviets was successively demolished in favour of a centralized one party state.
So, notably: Self-called "Marxist-Leninists" in the USSR, and Social Democrats (or "democratic socialists" in the US), and Right-wingers all far prefer the term to mean "government controls things." The latter because they can then point fingers and call things authoritarian (but somehow exempt corporate power from critique).
But it is not at all clear that 19th century socialists .. from Proudhon through Marx etc -- who coined the term -- meant this at all.
Also this hard line between "communism" and "socialism" is fictitious and very schematic. All communists call themselves socialists, and almost none of them agree on what that means.
Social democrats trying desperately to sound respectable clearly want a nice hard line there. But they also have no intention of bringing about socialism.
These are overloaded terms at this point which is part of the reason so few actually comprehend.
Even Capitalism, Communism, and Socialism can mean different things depending on the context and interpretation which is another part of the collective confusion.
If we had clear definitions, it *might* irradicate the confusion, but I don't see that happening in the forseeable future.
There's too much at stake for every involved party to clear things up.
> These are overloaded terms at this point which is part of the reason so few actually comprehend.
this is perhaps the smallest of all possible reasons that "few actually comprehend" :) yes, the left is good at eating itself, but that self-destruction is not without a lot of external assistance!
The writers for Star Trek spent a lot more time thinking about interstellar travel than I do, but I'm not going to go to them for advice about building a rocket ship.
The Rationalists are a philosophical/pseudo-religious organization in the same way the Daoists are. Just spending a lot time thinking about something doesn't make them right, it just makes them internally consistent with their chosen axioms. That is useful: if you agree with the axiomatic beliefs of such a movement, you can probably defer a lot of reasoning about the conclusions of those beliefs to the authority figures within that movement. But it doesn't change the probability of the axioms themselves being true, any moreso than the Pope saying so affects the probability of God existing.
AI Is Important And Potentially Dangerous is an axiomatic belief in the rationalist circles that are relevant to AI safety, in the same way that God Exists is axiomatic to Catholicism.
That's a fascinating assumption, and I wonder how you got to it, because it doesn't match anything I've ever seen. Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside. You are assuming their belief is religious and axiomatic, rather than very carefully reasoned about for decades, iterated on, discussed, debated, tested, and refined.
> Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside.
The converse is also true: Most groups look more heterogeneous from the inside than the outside. Again, to use the Christianity example: it takes a fair bit of inside baseball to figure out how various different sects and denominations are any different, but if you ask one of their priests, they'll be sure to tell you how Baptists and Episcopalians couldn't be more different.
It's a symptom of normalizing to an Overton window. From inside a church the belief that Jesus was just a guy who talked to God might seem an extreme fringe belief to someone who believes that Jesus is fully God, but from the outside we can lump them together as axiomatically holding that God Exists, because we have an Overton window ranging from "God doesn't exist" to "Allah talks to me everyday, and she gave me my promotion".
"Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside."
But that doesn't mean that they really are all that different in the end. It reminds me a of joke as told by Emo Philips that I think is quite apropos:
==-==-=
A man was walking across a bridge when he saw someone about to jump. He ran over and said, "Don't do it! There's so much to live for!"
"Like what?" the person asked.
"Well, are you religious?"
"Yes."
"Me too! Are you Christian or Jewish?"
"Christian."
"Me too! Protestant or Catholic?"
"Protestant."
"Me too! What denomination?"
"Baptist."
"Me too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?"
"Northern Baptist."
"Me too! Northern Baptist Conservative or Northern Baptist Liberal?"
It's good game theory. You're much more likely to be able to bully a Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1879 members into joining your cult than anybody else.
That not exactly a withering criticism of the rationalists because most people who have any opinion about AI believe that AI is important and potentially dangerous.
Running a business on that basis would look like the white(ish)-hat version of ransomware. "Oh, your data is gone? How much is it really worth to you?"
map() and reduce() are equivalent in terms of jargon, IMO. Map also suffers from name collision with dictionaries/objects/whatever your language wants to call a key-value pairing.
CJD develops in about 1/1,000,000 people per year globally, and the Fore people have a population of ~20,000. In theory, that suggests there should be an outbreak within 50 years of the society regularly consuming brain matter. Perhaps that number could be reduced somewhat by the infection rate, but the infection rate seems pretty high, to reach the level it did as fast as it did each person with Kuru needed to infect 1.6 people. Perhaps sporadic CJD isn't as sporadic as we assume, and it's tied to being in environments where others have had CJD? Another possibility is tied to the seeming link between genetics and the infection rate of Mad Cow Disease. Perhaps the population regularly went through boom-bust cycles, where everybody with 2 copies of the recessive gene that makes one more susceptible to transmission gets killed off, then the disease dies off for a long enough time for the carriers to re-introduce their recessive trait back into the gene pool.
That actually supports the point that people aren't acting under purely financial motivations. If the guy was purely following financial motivations, surely he would have chosen to sell the vulnerabilities to the shadier side of things. Instead, he dumped them publicly, burning their value while amplifying the "fuck you" factor to Microsoft.
Ignoring reports, or just fixing the vulnerability without acknowledging the work put in by a researcher, is rude and invites rudeness in return.
There's a pretty heavy survivorship bias on that, so you probably shouldn't extrapolate to all pre-civilization humans. For a group to remain largely uncontacted, it means they have to be remarkably insular, living somewhere other people don't want to be particularly bad (implying resource scarcity), and it definitely helps if they respond to attempts at contact with extreme violence.
Hunter-gatherers who survived to adulthood (and childbirth!) could expect to live to their mid 60's to early 70's. The big wins that modern medicine have gotten us are drastically decreasing infant/child mortality and deaths during childbirth. Compared to our ancestors, we've only really added 5-10 years to the life expectancy of elderly life. Largely unrelated to modern medicine, deaths by misadventure are reduced living in civilization, and then even moreso when you've got a large portion of the population not working in dangerous manual labor roles.
Level 5 is a pretty massive difficulty spike. Not sure if there's tech that I'm missing (it seems like 3 and 4 pretty strongly encourage double hits), or if I'm just bad.
Unfortunately, when you've got 2 choices, one being "Let's round up the pinkos" and the other being "Nothing will fundamentally change", the actual Leftists have to choose the lesser of two evils.
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