Which is worse: ('>' signifying "worse than" in this case)

@KantInEast It's not just a matter of quantity, it's a matter of quality. If you can't design well problems reproduce. Sure decongesting would work for some time. But it would be like adding lanes to highways, which is known to increase congestion over time. Yet politicians keep doing it.

@KantInEast If anything a new city would be worse. They'd appoint the same planner (Bimal Patel) who did the Parliament and Central Vista Project, the Sabarmati Riverfront Project (A'bad). Majority planners and architects would be ignored to make a whole city as lifeless as those places now.

A deeper metaphysical issue is the separation between the subjective and the objective that went along with this. What I mean by this is: In modern thought, (value-laden) qualities only apply to what is considered subjective things, like experiences; good and bad don't apply to objective things. So in dominant ideology, one may like a movie, but saying that a movie is objectively good will raise suspicions of snobbery or totalitarianism. This enables all kinds of experiences to be possibly considered good. The issue is that the objective-subjective dichotomy doesn't hold in the most authentic and joyful states of existence. There cannot be Good without both a subjective and objective component enmeshed and dissolved in one another. There cannot be valid reporting of subjective good without some valid objective counterpart. Not all things are Good, and those that are Good are marked by a value-complex that involves both a specific kind of experience, joy you could say as distinguished from mere pleasure, that is inseparable from the objective component—likewise, there is no talk of the objective component that is good without some strand of Spirit, the real Self, call whatever you will the truly existing subjective component, having some necessarily joyful state of relation in the production or reproduction (enjoyment) of it. This also clearly ties to the distinction between hedonic and eudaimonic pleasure.

@ChairmanRabbit I mean this is the guy who thinks tariffs and tax breaks can work together. He is either a genius who will redefine political economy for the third millennium CE, or (more likely), he lives in la-la-land, with 20% positives coming from the bravado it enables and 80% negatives.

Both are moreover horrendous as far as the social fabric and our ideas of normal integrity go. The Dems/left believe in finding moral superiority from spreading the message that people have more that divides them than unites them, and MAGA is a movement of utter skulduggery.

If AGI were to hit today society would descend into chaos because neither side would have the foggiest idea what to do. If anything Trump would be more willing to undertake a swift, drastic, iron-fisted solution, but he's also contributing more to the problem.

Democrats are still effectively following the Hillary playbook—everything will be fine with a bit of tweaking here and there and representation, equity, etc. are the top priorities of society. Trump is great in countering institutional wokeism but clueless on existential risk.

@ggreenwald Is it comparable though? I want to be sympathetic to this take, but isn't much US money going to election observers or even as far as more direct interference goes to capacity-building for pro-democracy parties—not direct ads/propaganda? And if so is that meaningfully different?

@priyankchn A wrapper in the way the wrapper of the Earth's inner core is the rest of the Earth. If the core were to cool, the planet were to grow cold and life would (probably) end—at the same time there is simply far more wrapper and core and the wrapper is itself quite amazing.

This whole affair is interesting actually because a fairly valid historical analysis is: Individual human well-being is the prime concern of liberalism—like, not left, but so-called "Enlightenment" liberalism. Now, the left is entirely a descendant of the liberal tradition, even as it rejects some aspects of it in favor of communitarianism and such. As such, there is no left that cares about things apart from well-being. Whereas though the liberal right is prominent in the West (muh-freedom right—largely MAGA, Tea Party, neocons), the idea is that it can only be "right" that cares about something that is greater than or irreducible to individual well-being or utility-functions—this would be the right that defended the Old Regimes back in the day to far right politics today that place intrinsic value in national, ethnic or religious cultures. But here we have the left affirming collective existence or the objective existence of a society irreducible to the positive affect felt by its member organisms. Which it does sometimes, esp. when it comes to indigenous cultures, but there's always the sense that they're doing that still for utilitarian reasons—it's bad to "delete" indigenous or marginalized cultures because having their cultures alive is good for marginalized communities. And that argument may also be made still in the case of Gaza, but it's just very hard, given the real situation there. And this instance is also starkly notable because it exists in very loud dialectic with the right, which in this case is full-on utilitarian (though I'd say largely for expedient or tribal reasons); it rarely happens that the left champions an objective good while the right champions a subjective good as the alternative to that. Both usually champion objective good in their own ways independently, or also often these days, the left champions some subjective good against the right championing objective good ("But won't anyone think of the feelings of everyone who'll be deported or have their families separated" vs. "What matters is the character or essence of the nation, which transcends any given individuals".) But all this may be a good reminder that there isn't actually a necessary relation between what-happens-to-be-left and caring only about subjective good/individual well-being on one hand and what-happens-to-be-right and caring about objective good/greater-than-individual good on the other. Need (maybe) better models of the definitive essence of left and right.

@mr_scientism The still-mainstream skepticism that symbolic approaches are necessary stands as the greatest bulwark against supertintelligence dystopias.