this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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I was going to shitpost that Trump is the least neo-colonial president cuz he cut all foreign aid, but I realized I kinda believe that unironically. I'm in the anti-death-and-suffering camp of course, but a hundred kinda self-serving national aid programs might just not cut it.
(This might be inspired by the Merz government planning to roll the special development aid office into the foreign affairs ministry, partly to tie it more strongly to national interest.)
Maybe we need to bring back the UN bigly.
Yeah I think long term Trump wrecking US soft power might be good for the world. There is going to be a lot of immediate suffering because a lot of those programs were also doing good things (in addition to strengthening US soft power or pushing a neocolonial agenda or whatever else).
I would be more inclined to agree if there was an actual better alternative wait to fill in the gap. Instead we're probably going to see the loss of US soft power be replaced by EU, Russian, and particularly Chinese soft power. I'm not sufficiently propagandized to say that's strictly worse than being under US soft power, especially as practiced by the kinds of people that support EA. But it also isn't really an improvement in terms of enabling autonomous development.
Russia doesn’t really do, or indeed understand, soft power, beyond causing mischief with disinformation operations. In the Russian strategic mindset, winning the hearts and minds of a population is unacceptably inefficient compared to the alternatives, such as bribing local gangsters to become a fake popular movement, cultivating useful idiots among the far left and/or right, flooding the field with disinformation, or just massive invasion.
The world is never going to be listening to R-pop on their Art.Lebedev phone in the queue at the hip new piroshki truck and wishing they were in Moscow where things are happening.
counterpoint
True. I'll admit my primary thought was about the Chinese Belt and Road initiative, but I didn't want to discount other aspiring neocolonialists trying their hands at it.