From a widely cited defense of the Black Lives Matter synthetic meme at Reddit:

… societally, we don’t pay as much attention to certain people’s deaths as we do to others. So, currently, we don’t treat all lives as though they matter equally.

Two points:
(1) Some lives (and deaths) do matter far more than others, obviously. Everyone knows this, when they’re not high, even if they usually feel compelled to lie about it. (Some lives, indeed, characterized by criminality and parasitism, are worth less than nothing — and even considerably less.) Only bizarre religious ideas could lead anybody to think the opposite.
(2) Western societies are very rapidly losing the ability to make sane calls on the point, as exceptional productivity loses its capacity to inspire attention, and the merely piteous usurps its central cultural position.

In the absence of adaptive sensibilities, life insurance premiums — or some equivalent expression of undemonstrative, practical value-processing — will have to serve as a default.

How could any society not want this type of enrichment to happen in its urban centers?

Uber-Chaos, apparently. [Or not.]

ADDED: Given the likelihood of time-pwnage here, ‘meanwhile’ should probably be read as ‘sometime in the 21st century’. It says Sept. 1 on the Youtube video, but that probably means less than I’d assumed. See (brief) comment by ‘Ano nymous’ in the thread below.

ADDED (from The New Yorker): To add a little gravitas.

“This machine breeds fascists.”

Given Jesse Benn’s repulsive indulgence in self-criticism on other people’s behalf, the riposte almost writes itself. It’s hard to see anything in the push-back that seems uncalled for.

Just to be clear: Speaking as a self-appointed representative for people you feel free to disassociate from at will is as annoying as hell. It’s hard for me to believe Benn is too stupid to see that, which leaves the malignant devious evil option.

If the West sees another mass outbreak of antisemitism, a plaintive “Why?” is going to look laughable. Benn’s ilk are why.

(You might want the other half of the proxy-masochism cognitive dissonance machinery. This (entirely non-obnoxious piece) is also well-worth a read.)

There has been a self-propelling gore-meme building here about the cosmic butcher’s yard. It might be necessary to scrub that (or perhaps hose it down). Until we’re discussing a nuked butcher’s yard, we’re not approaching a topic Gnonologists should be ready to get out of bed for.

‘Extinction Events Can Accelerate Evolution’ argue Joel Lehman and Risto Miikkulainen (at the link cited). Their abstract:

Extinction events impact the trajectory of biological evolution significantly. They are often viewed as upheavals to the evolutionary process. In contrast, this paper supports the hypothesis that although they are unpredictably destructive, extinction events may in the long term accelerate evolution by increasing evolvability. In particular, if extinction events extinguish indiscriminately many ways of life, indirectly they may select for the ability to expand rapidly through vacated niches. Lineages with such an ability are more likely to persist through multiple extinctions. Lending computational support for this hypothesis, this paper shows how increased evolvability will result from simulated extinction events in two computational models of evolved behavior. The conclusion is that although they are destructive in the short term, extinction events may make evolution more prolific in the long term.

(The computer dimension catches Kurzweil’s attention, but that’s a distraction right now.)

Chronic cosmic holocaust, it seems, is just for the tweaks. It’s mostly conservative, preventing deterioriation in mutational load, through quasi-continuous culling of nature’s minor freakeries. In order to actually up the game, nothing quite substitutes for a super-compressed catastrophe (or mass extinction) which cranks evolution to the meta-level of superior ‘evolvability’. By gnawing-off and burning entire branches of life, crises plowing deep into the X-risk zone stimulate plasticity in the biosphere’s phyletic foundations. As Kurzweil glosses the finding: “… some evolutionary biologists hypothesize that extinction events actually accelerate evolution by promoting those lineages that are the most evolvable, meaning ones that can quickly create useful new features and abilities.”

Continue Reading

From Tyler Cowan (I’m not sure how much of the humor is intended):

If I were at the Fed, I would consider a “dare” quarter point increase just to show the world that zero short rates are not considered necessary for prosperity and stability.

(Open thread + links)

Fifty years hence. An NRx tribe, and its buried roots. The start of a conversation? The terrible herd (also). Thoughts on abortion. Traditional Britain. The week in reaction (and don’t forget this).

Chinese geostrategy. The cryptic dragon, and its historical echoes. Global commerce visualized. Cheap oil and global disorder. A Venezuela update. Wolves in Bangkok? Schism in the Yakuza. Laibach in North Korea.

Limits of quantitative easing. Decentralized planning. Statistical discretion. The communist legacy. The story of our time.

NRO’s Kevin Williamson against the Trumperistas: “In The Duel, his account of the confrontation between Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill, the great historian John Lukacs explores one of modern history’s terrible ironies: that even as the national socialists were defeated in Germany, national socialism became the world’s predominant political philosophy, albeit stripped of the cruelty and hatred that animated its German expression. ‘We are all national socialists now,’ he writes. Some models are a little more nationalist (Trump) and some are a little more socialist (Sanders), but both reject laissez-faire categorically. ‘Hitler was not the founder of National Socialism, not even in Germany,’ Lukacs writes, ‘but he recognized the potential marriage of nationalism with socialism, and also the practical — and not merely rhetorical — primacy of nationalism within that marriage. … He also knew that old-fashioned capitalism was gone; that belonged to the 19th century.’ Lukacs relates an episode in which Hitler was asked whether he would nationalize German industry. Hitler insisted there was no need: ‘I shall nationalize the people.'” (Despite the Godwin Ragnarok, it gets the history basically right.) Trump’s inheritance (also), and New Yorker coverage, with pushback.

Rise of the cultural libertarians (and a response). Non-suicidal libertarianism. Bitcoin-fork commentary (1, 2, 3). The Columbia fainting couch.

Christianity’s early history. Toxic compassion. On teleology. A jealous god. Realism in religion. Faith in the future.

Mystic cognition, and delirium without acid. Entropy for Bayesians. Quantum weirdness looking resilient. An exascale computer. Biology of morals. Apocalypse Neanderthal. Psychology’s reproduction problem (see).

It begins. More computer racism. Literary dynamite. Slavery gets a bad rap. Black-on-black. When book clubs attack. The NYT’s noticing problem. Obama didn’t help. A modest proposal. Henry Harpending, hate criminal. Genophobia.

A gay “sub-culture of death“.

Trouble at the Hugos (1, 2, 3, 4), but at least this came out of them. Victorian Hugos. The CIA and the literati.

Here‘s an example of the distinction being used in a discussion between libertarians. It would be surprising if the distinction lacked useful application to NRx controversies. It goes without saying (I’m assuming) that the NAP wouldn’t serve as the ultimate, irreducible axiom in that case, but what would? Perhaps: Maximal localization of consequences (and thus cybernetic sensitivity)?

‘Privatization’ isn’t a bad compression of this principle. The case for private (or commercialized) government would therefore be quite easily enveloped by it.

"I will be banning people a lot, going forward." http://t.co/xevJdqMoW8 And see: http://t.co/wGvj7iHs7K Abusive idiots need stringing up.

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) August 28, 2015

This is here for the AoS links.

I’ve been meaning to do a house-keeping post on commenting, and these remarks say most of what’s necessary. It obviously applies mostly to people who are the least likely to read it, so it’s necessary to be emphatic about the extreme appreciation I have for the core commentariat here, as well as many irregular commentators who make the blog what it is. That said, I’ve been acutely aware of my tendency to excessive liberalism in blog management recently, and also killing / gibbeting more abusive idiots than usual. That’s not going to stop, and will quite probably intensify.

As Ace remarks:

Your problems are your problems, and your problems alone; your emotional problems and angry outbursts will no longer be acceptable blog fodder here. […] If this blog is too fast for you — if people making arguments you might disagree with is just too painful for your mind to take — well, there’s lots of other blogs on the web; I suggest you try one that’s more your speed. […] We here are pretty good commenters, and pretty good at discussion and at repartee; we’re not going to be dragged down to a sub-moron level simply because that’s the only level at which a sub-moron feels he can participate … […] These are the rules, and they will be enforced. Adjust your behavior accordingly.

“Disneyland with the death penalty” is the administrative model.

Three clotted together is stretching the category, but still. Here‘s Laird Barron:

Lovecraft’s vision interests me more than the particulars of that vision. In the sense that he looked past mythological horrors, and the modern horrors of writers such as Dunsany, I try to look past Lovecraft and into the essence of what provokes our fascination with cosmic horror. We’re all gazing into the same abyss. As it pertains to fiction, the biggest, constantly repeated mistake in contemporary horror is that most writers fixate on Lovecraft, or CA Smith, or Ligotti, and so on, instead of examining that radioactive core at the heart of everything.

China is bailing out of US Treasury paper (ZH reports).