07mk
2d ago
The exact number determines how many martyrs you can justify, right? 160 would mean that up to 2 freedom fighters could securely murder-suicide themselves, but a third would only get about 22% of what he's owed in the afterlife.
07mk
2d ago
Tbf a good part of the this cause is also just illiteracy.
The thing is that journalists and others in the media either know that illiteracy of this type is incredibly common among the audience of their articles and even moreso among the audience of their headlines, or they have the intelligence and knowledge required to know. So when there's significant misunderstanding by the audience of stuff like this, it speaks to either malice, malicious ignorance, or incompetence that's advanced enough to be indistinguishable from malice.
07mk
2d ago
One thing I've taken to doing to help me use AI in my job (which I do a lot these days, and it's growing) is to use as good an AI as I have access to (Claude Opus right now) how to use an LLM to solve some problem I have, and using that as a guide to use other, cheaper LLMs to accomplish whatever task I have. I couldn't help but notice that your comment is essentially a prompt that i might enter into an AI, just dorected at a bunch of NIs. If I were in your situation, I'd try copying and pasting your entire comment into Claude and then go from there.
07mk
2d ago
IMO woke history revisionism is one of the most damaging trends in modern academia, simply because of how much it is allowed to proliferate uncritically or even treated with any seriousness. It usually manifests in the systematic downplaying (or outright denial) of slavery, human sacrifice and other endemic practices among non white civilisations, and claiming that white men somehow introduced these vices to their otherwise harmonious civilisations.
Yes, but also, this is just a generic problem with anything "woke" in academia, because one of the core tenets of "woke" is the rejection of logic, rationality, and empirical evidence in favor of "other ways of knowing" based on claims by people who belong to favored identity groups, since the former are oppressive inventions of White Supremacy and Patriarchy. As such, there's no limiting factor for claims made by people who are at or close to the top of the oppression totem pole. Academics resolve the cognitive dissonance between this and the fact that academia is fundamentally about applying reason, evidence, and skepticism, by just looking the other way when such claims are made. This applies outside academia, too, of course.
There's also a recurring theme in progressive history circles to claim the Americas would've still evolved to become the modern superpower that it is today had European settlers never arrived on these shores, as if leaving the indigenous peoples entirely undisturbed would have produced equivalent institutional, scientific, and industrial outcomes. Even though historical and even current parameters do not support this claim.
I doubt even they believe this though, but saying it out loud would get them exiled by their ingroup as it would be implying that atrocities (real or perceived) against indigenous Americans was justified as it had led to more productive outcomes.
I'm sure some are performing like this - perhaps more now than ever - but let me assure you, I know for a fact that this is a genuine, sincere belief that has been held by at least one person in this group, and I have near-fact-level confidence that an extremely high proportion of people claiming this also do genuinely, sincerely believe it (to whatever extent anyone can be said to genuinely believe anything, anyway).
07mk
3d ago
With so many women chasing so-called "Chad" it's become very easy for a woman to find a guy who has solid morals; a decent job; and genuine desire for a long-term committed relationship. Provided she is willing to overlook the fact that he is short; or balding; or mediocre in facial attractiveness.
In other words, it hasn't gotten any easier for women to find a mate who has solid morals; a decent job; and genuine desire for a long-term committed relationship.
07mk
3d ago
men are probably more socialized to not challenge other men on their driving habits
If we're speculating that this isn't just an artifact and that there's a there there, my bias based on personal experience is that this is a factor. The only friends I have that are at all defensive about their driving habits, to the extent that even grabbing the handle when they're driving gets a side-eye, and pointing out anything wrong with their driving could cause a shouting match, are male. As such, I learned to put on an act when driving with such friends. I speculate that it may be a consequence of testosterone and/or the greater societal pressure to be seen as competent at such activities that men have relative to women.
07mk
3d ago
Maybe in the 90s the memeplex around dating was "go grrrl", but today there's plenty of wisdom in the air that men [that they notice first] are not out for the women's best interest. One needs but listen and learn.
Well, listening and learning is hard enough for anyone, but I think there's a catch-22 here that's specific to this situation, in that the people they need to listen and learn from in order to avoid these pitfalls are people that they, almost by definition, don't respect or even notice. I do agree with you that it's entirely the personal responsibility for someone, woman or man, to avoid people who are romantically harmful to themselves, and the negative treatment of women in this context is the responsibility of the women who choose to tolerate or even reward such treatment. But I don't think they can help it any more than men can help being attracted enough to skinny, youthful women that they enable awful behavior from that set.
07mk
3d ago
But credit or pride? No, silly, you can't be proud of things members of your group did! You can't take credit for advances that were achieved by your forefathers! Those were individual accomplishments that you had no role in! Why would we let you claim
This isn't true, though. A common, but not major, "woke" talking point is that black people ought to be proud of all the things their ancestors did, often including rather historically questionable claims of inventions or identities, such as the claim that Shakespeare plagiarized from a black woman or that Cleopatra was black. Of course, this is often justified on the basis that this sort of pride is only to make up for the way oppressive society forces them to be shamed merely for existing or whatever, but also of course, the actual explanation doesn't matter. It's just who/whom, based on identities that educated people can convince themselves belong to whatever part of the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy.
True, but sufficiently advanced risk-taking is indistinguishable from suicide.
Interesting, I'd never encountered it written out so well, but this is a concept I ran into (somewhat) recently. I had a friend who committed suicide, which caught every one of his friends and family by surprise. Cliche about how he was always the most lively person in any setting where he was, and how much better he was at socializing and bringing people together than anyone else applies in full here. One of the many things he was known for, though, was being an incredibly reckless (and yet somehow also wreck-less) driver. Almost everyone I met who had been driven by him once (including myself) sweared off ever being driven by him again, for fear of death, and he regularly drove his moped for hours through snowy/rainy/stormy weather day or night, ostensibly just to visit us or other friends. After the fact, some of us in his friend group started wondering if his driving behavior was a form of passive suicide that he was seeking out. He never left a note or confided in anyone who has spoken out (closest we've got is multiple of his ex-girlfriends noting how different and dead he appeared in private after the many social events he would both organize and improve through his presence, but no one ever considered this notable until after the suicide), so we'll never know (and even he might not have been privy to his motivations at the time).
Also interestingly enough, despite owning both firearms and vehicles, his way of going involved engineering a contraption to suffocate himself with helium, something which seemed to have taken some planning and execution over some hours, if not days, for procurement. I imagine there are likely many other people who had similar mindsets who made snap decisions during driving that appeared as accidents rather than suicide.
07mk
4d ago
Perhaps it's just more common for couples to go places with the man driving; that if women were driving it would be men who are stereotypical backseat drivers.
My guess would be that this is responsible for a lot of it, as an artifact of the likely reality (citation needed) that when a man and a woman are traveling together in a car with one of them driving, the majority of the time and distance involve the man driving and, as such, the woman is the one more often in the position to back/side-seat drive. The reason for this phenomena are likely many, including that men are more incentivized to take the lead and responsibility, especially in romantic relationships and that men are more likely to be the richer one and therefore more likely to be the car owner in the case that they're romantic partners. I'd also guess that men are more likely than women not to consider driving to be a burden.
There's also the fact that men tend to have higher risk tolerance, and so driving behavior that he considers reasonable could be considered dangerous by her more often than the other way around.
If there's any particular real difference in behavior, I'd guess that it's because women are incentivized by society to direct men to solve their problems in a way that men aren't incentivized to direct women - or other men - to solve theirs. But I don't know how much is left over to explain after my first 2 paragraphs above.
07mk
4d ago
I was going to say that your question doesn't seem small scale, but then I realized that it's actually the most literally small scale question that has been asked here.
07mk
5d ago
This is my default explanation for anything that Trump does. The last decade has proven to me that he's unthinking and uncaring at the best of times, and the last 2 years has made me believe that he's entered a stage in his life that aren't the best times. Also, I think that the conclusion that he's a narcissist with a god complex is pretty easy to reach independent of this, and trying to claim that this post adds meaningful evidence of this seems rather silly. I'm reminded of around mid-late 2024, when some media outlet presented the argument that Trump was fascist/Nazi/Hitler-like (I don't recall exactly which), and a bunch of people were breathlessly pointing at the argument as some novel point that should convince former Trump voters, as if calling him giga-Hitler hadn't just been SOP for his loudest opponents continually since 2015.
No one is going to get cancer because they tried smoking a couple of times
Why not? People get lung cancer without ever smoking as well. There very well could be some non-smokers whose lung cells were, just due to dumb luck and coincidence, 1 inhale away from becoming cancerous, and 1 puff triggered it. Probably not many, though.
Which, I think, gets at the issue that this argument is about quantity, not quality. Is sex -> pregnancy more like driving or smoking, where you could reasonably do it tens of thousands of times and still not get the consequence, or is it more like playing Russian Roulette with 6 bullets, where your odds of surviving is the odds of the bullet or gun being defective plus of your aim being off enough either to miss or cause non-fatal damage (actually 1-(1-(odds))*(1-odds)), I think, but that's a good-enough approximation), and by how much? I think most people place the line somewhere in between for determining the morality of elective abortion, and it's the different places where people put that line that cause conflict. Especially since many of those people don't even seem to recognize that they're placing such a line, much less where that line is for themselves.
07mk
5d ago
In your own example, we don't deny care or deny the attempt to fix lung cancer from smokers.
We do, at the margins, because we make smokers pay higher health insurance premiums, which reduces their access to care that would fix lung cancer. Similar is the case for car accidents as well, since a track record of reckless driving increases auto insurance premiums, which reduces one's access to mitigate the consequences of auto accidents one gets into.
Given that pregnancy and abortion are more all-or-none things rather than near-continuous like insurance premiums and payouts, I think the analogy breaks down here, though.
07mk
5d ago
That seems a bit defeatist. I am not saying people shouldn't be allowed vastly more wealth than me, or to retire early. Just that the current richest people are clearly too rich and powerful for the good of society. I am essentially asking for policies that would prevent individuals and companies from getting this big in the first place, and to break up the existing monopolies into smaller, competing groups.
This isn't clear to me, though. At the very least, it's not clear to me that policies that would accomplish this would make society better rather than immensely worse. It's not clear to me it would make it immensely worse, either, but I certainly know which way I would bet if it were possible to adjudicate this and pay out.
07mk
5d ago
These things are based on moral intuitions that are fundamentally subjective. I don't think I could ever change my personal mind on that issue to be completely honest, but on a societal scale, this is obviously not sustainable. There needs to be some way to reconcile a difference in moral values.
I don't know the solution to this, but I've long thought that one critically important step towards one must be that people both allow for and welcome the expression of values very different from - and explicitly contradictory to - their own, ideally in proportion to how much they disagree with it and how much those values would destroy them if actually adopted IRL. That's the only way, as I see it, that it's possible to reasonably adjudicate different moral values, though that hardly seems sufficient. Unfortunately, I don't know how to create a set of incentives that create this kind of behavior in society at large.
07mk
6d ago
If we're presuming a benevolent superintelligence, I don't see why simulations couldn't provide exactly the right amount and type of struggle to each individual to provide just the right amount of meaning in their lives such that, at each moment, they genuinely feel like they're leading the most meaningful life they could be living. For all you or I know, we're currently in an alpha version of that simulation right now. Surely such a superintelligence would be familiar with Brave New World and other dystopian fiction and criticisms about them and at least try to route around the pitfalls.
07mk
6d ago
Which leads me to my takeaway: I think the only way to really release the pressure permanently will be is to give in to populist demands and start reforming parts of the economy that are currently set up for rent extraction at the behest of shareholders.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that giving in to populist demands will only make the problem a thousand times worse. Improvements in the economy, particularly in the inequality, seems likely to help, but if it's not done in a way that is credibly completely divorced from the behavior of the Mangiones of the world, it seems only likely to embolden them. Especially since, in the not unlikely case that giving in to populist demands only makes everything worse for the people at the bottom, it will likely cause the Mangione-supporters to double down in the "beatings will continue until morale improves" sort of way that's pretty standard in all politics these days.
07mk
6d ago
It's interesting to me that, as far as I can tell, right now is when OpenAI is the least impressive relative to competitors ever since they kicked off the modern LLM chatbot era with GPT 3.5 almost half a decade ago, and that's when the most violence against its CEO is happening. Even if, somehow, like a video game boss, his murder caused the complete liquidation of OpenAI and disbursement of the proceeds to his murderer, it's doubtful it would put a meaningful dent in the consequences of LLMs in employment and other societal things.
Last week, there was also someone who filmed himself setting fire to a Kimberly Clark warehouse, having been disgruntled over his low pay. He reportedly explicitly compared himself to Luigi Mangione, and I've noticed at least some significant amount of support for him, by the same sorts of people who also lionized Mangione and support the attempts on Altman's life. I don't know where things are going, but I'm pretty sure that more escalation of this type of behavior will lead to nowhere good, triply so for the least well-off parts of society, and I just hope this is a blip instead of a sign of things to come. I'm not sure what else there is to do to stop it other than ramping up law enforcement and making sure that those convicted of such actions get the harshest punishment possible without martyring them. Which doesn't seem like it'd be enough, though.
07mk
6d ago
By arbitrary, I mean that there's no particular characteristics that they must take on, other than the fact that they're fundamental values. A person could have a fundamental value of praising God or of making sure that the final digit of the S&P500 closing value each day is 6, or of watching Mrs. Doubtfire as many times as possible in their lifetime, or anything else. It's arbitrary.
Random, as I understand it, means impossible to predict (if not literally, at least practically). I coin flip is random in that one cannot, with confidence, claim that either of the 2 outcomes (ignoring the edge and the shape of actual IRL coins causing bias - again, practically) is more likely than the other. When I see, say, a woman wearing a nun's habit praying in a church, I believe that can make predictions about her fundamental values that are more likely than chance to be correct.
07mk
7d ago
I interpreted the original hypothetical as Alice being better in all things except for fundamental morality - hence why she thinks something as evil as X is good.
07mk
7d ago
They're arbitrary, but not random. They're not "good and right" in some sort of objective sense, and whether they're worth holding onto would depend heavily on the exact specifics. Whether it's possible not to hold onto those is also a separate question that I think the answer is No to most people in most contexts.
07mk
7d ago
How does the smart, brave, loyal person come to sincerely believe in the absolutely evil and abhorrent X? Is she simply misinformed and deluded? Either she or 'you' or both have fatally misperceived something.
I don't think this follows. I think it's entirely possible for two equally intelligent, brave, loyal, [insert good adjective here] people to look at the same set of facts and come to equal and opposite conclusions about the goodness of the exact same thing, because people can have arbitrary fundamental values that inform every other value they have.
I'm hopeful, but I'm still skeptical that this past week signifies a true return to norm. I'm not that commenter you referenced, and I also haven't made any money from the Iran war... yet. A little after the war started, I had spent some of my high-risk investment money to get into a Vanguard energy-industry fund, which has mostly been responsive to oil prices, and I've certainly lost money after today, but I also decided to put more into it today, because of my pessimism that the market is a little too caught up in the hype. We'll see.
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