07mk
7mo ago
I think there is no more value to be gained from continuing this discussion. So we shall, as you say, agree to disagree.
I'm impressed by the balls you have to repeatedly put false words in my mouth and to project your own insecurities onto me and then end with an "agree to disagree." It's legit admirable.
07mk
7mo ago
Yeah, fair enough, probably "much better" was overselling it, and it's not the kind of thing that would have allowed some threshold to be crossed. Like you allude to, that it's IRL acquaintance is pretty significant.
07mk
7mo ago
The mod creator appeared earnest in recommending other mods that whitewashed black characters.
The comments on the mod itself by defenders were of the "woke double standards" type, which genuinely angers some anti-woke types.
This is additional information that one had to look up about the modder - the point of contention here is on whether "your very deliberate modding choices don't at the very least say something about where your lines are," and these go beyond the modder's very deliberate modding choices. If you want to say that this specific modder was likely racist because of the various lines of evidence that we can see from that modder's behavior, I would agree with you 100%. That's not what what I'm arguing about. And talking about "context" doesn't actually add anything to this, because "context" isn't the issue; the modding choices didn't tell us anything about whether the modder was racist, with or without the additional details that added context - it was those additional details that told us whether the modder was racist.
Yes, I determined the context. I am allowed to state what that context is and why I think that is. If you find it unconvincing, so be it, but it's telling that you don't afford me enough charity to not claim I'm trying to decide everyone's opinion.
I mean, fair enough if it's "so be it." Your statements seemed pretty definitive, that you found absurd my belief that a modder's deliberate modding choices can't be used to pass non-trivial judgment on the modder's thinking, but if you just agree to disagree, that's fine as it is.
So why don't I see you in every thread about progressives reminding everybody that they don't know why progressives do what they do beyond an individual level?
Well, one reason is that when people are talking about "progressives," they're usually talking about a set of people who voluntarily signed up for a particular sociopolitical cause. There are loose boundaries, blurry lines, edge cases, and controversy of course, and I'm against psychoanalyzing in almost all cases, but I'm of the opinion that someone's publicly stated sociopolitical positions do provide information about their sociopolitical positions in a way that someone's published entertainment products doesn't. It's certainly true that people here leap very far to conclusions that are entirely unjustified, based on projecting their own insecurities and bitterness onto these "progressives," and I would say that's just as unjustified as claiming that modding a video game to change a character's race is indicative of the modder's racism. It's just that such lines tend to be just one-off low-effort swipes rather than substantive points about how we can divine people's inner sociopolitical beliefs based on their behavior in other realms such as art. The low-effort swipes are bad and lower the standard of discourse here, but I'm not a moderator.
I also personally find it hard to argue against such psychoanalysis of progressives when they perfectly match the mentality that I myself lived through as a progressive. Of course, I can argue just as well as anyone that, just because I happen to be an existence-proof of the reality of the mentality of the progressives that someone is bitching about here, that doesn't mean that any other progressive than me has that mentality. It's that when I see someone who clearly understands my own thinking so well despite never having met me, much less been within my mind, it gives me pause and makes me want to listen rather than argue. I don't experience this when it comes to people accused of being racist due to their creation of entertainment products, since I find the claimed mindset quite foreign.
So when you tell me that there's no limit as to why a person may want to make a black person white in Stardew Valley, your next step, if you were intellectually honest, would be to start assigning probabilities to each of those reasons. Do that, and I suspect you're going to quickly get into very small numbers after 5.
And this step, if one is intellectually honest, is to admit that we can't assign meaningfully accurate probabilities to these reasons that aren't just dominated by our own biases. If we had some sort of empirical evidence to rely on that shows some relation between "make a black person white in Stardew Valley" (or more generically "make [X] person [Y] in [ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCT]") and "racism in the creator" (obviously can't be mind reading, but racist is as racist does, and so this can be detected through other actions), we could perhaps discuss these probabilities with some very large error bars. Unfortunately, the very mechanism by which we can collect this sort of evidence has largely discredited itself in this realm, and so we're mostly left grasping for straws.
07mk
7mo ago
Apparently, no one is allowed to conclude that a person is more likely to be racist if they download a mod that makes the only black person in a game white even though there's no world-building reason against his presence.
Correct, because that would be leaping to conclusions. Your expression of incredulity that someone won't leap to the same conclusions you will doesn't make that leap any less of a leap.
By all means, propose alternatives for why this person is making this mod. I can think of only one other.
First of all, I don't need to propose alternatives, because the conclusion that they're doing it out of racist motivations isn't some "default" or "safe" conclusion that we can just draw. But just off the top of my head, the first obvious reason is to troll the types of people who would get their panties in a wad over things like this. Those people might contend that the trolling is racist, but of course that's by no means a commonly accepted meaning of "racism" - in fact, it's a highly contentious one. This took me all of 5 seconds to think of. Which, again, is not at all necessary; it's the leap from "he changed some colors of fictional characters in a video game" to "he has racist motivations" that needs the justification. It took me another 15 seconds to think of the explanation that the modder finds the stylized representation of the character in the game to look better with a certain color scheme over another color scheme. Both of these could be motivated by racism, of course, because literally every action, innocuous or not, could be motivated by racism. But leaping to the conclusion that they are requires actual additional, specific justification.
To me, it feels like an overly restrictive and closed view of the diversity and idiosyncracies of humanity to believe that one can just simply conclude from "He changed all the black heroes to white heroes"
I made it clear that context matters in my various responses in this thread. I don't think there's anything racist in the creation or use of that one BG3 mod that makes characters fit the established lore on appearances better. But you don't get that justification for something like Stardew Valley because the "lore" reasoning doesn't apply.
You make it clear that you can say that context matters while also insisting that you get to determine the context based on your own personal idiosyncratic views on the matter. But the reality is that we aren't mind readers with very little insight into the internal and unique thinking process of other people. There's no limit of the number of completely innocuous, non-racist reasons why someone could have changed the only black character to white in a way that is irrelevant to the lore, even if you or I couldn't think of any of them (which isn't the case, since I can think of some of them, but that's besides the point).
07mk
7mo ago
This is an interesting definitional question. I would say No to both questions, though it's almost a Yes for the latter one. Racism is necessarily interpersonal, but it doesn't require some form of direct interaction/exchange. But it does need to play out in some form of interaction/exchange, even if theoretical or intended. If I go to a bunch of other Korean-Americans like myself and tell them to go out and shoot up a bunch of Slavs because Slavs deserve to be shot or whatever, I'm not directly being interacting with Slavs to be racist towards them, but I'm clearly setting up a chain of events meant to create a direct interaction between members of different races to act in racist ways towards each other.
If you spend 10 minutes meditating on how much you hate black people, but then that meditation doesn't affect how you treat black people or how you tell others to treat black people during the other 23 hours and 50 minutes of the day, then I don't see how it could possibly be racist.
07mk
7mo ago
Why did someone make or install this mod? It clearly didn't come into existence because particles randomly happened to generate the mod. If the reason was one we would call racist, then yes, we can reasonably infer that someone at the very least made something racist that may indicate their own racial prejudice. Sure, we can't prove racism totally. But I think it is entirely reasonable to be at least somewhat more convinced that the creator is racist.
You jump from "why" to "it's entirely reasonable to be at least somewhat more convinced [of a conclusion]." I disagree with this. I think the entirely reasonable thing is to say "We don't know," and being convinced, somewhat or otherwise, of the creator's racism or other beliefs sans external independent evidence, is unreasonable. Yes, if the reason the creator made the mod were one that we would call racist, then it's entirely reasonable to say that the creator is a racist racist who racistly created a racist mod in order to spread his racism. That's a big if, one that can't really be checked by observers only from looking at the mod.
You either believe in an overly strict chain of causality and inference, or you are trying to establish a principled stance that you don't actually uphold in real life.
??? I don't see what's overly strict about this chain of causality, and I don't see on what basis you get to claim that I don't uphold this in real life. To me, it appears like you're doing here to me the same thing that I'm accusing you of doing with this mod theoretical to the modder, which is projecting your own biases onto the situation and asserting that someone else must be (somewhat more likely to be) acting in a certain way because of how your projected biases relate to their observed behavior. To me, it feels like an overly restrictive and closed view of the diversity and idiosyncracies of humanity to believe that one can just simply conclude from "He changed all the black heroes to white heroes" or "He changed all the demonic enemies to cis white people, to be murdered by the POC champion protagonist" that "He did this out of his sociopolitical beliefs that are in accordance with the direct, straight-up pattern-matching against this mod (i.e. that if I modify a work of fiction to more glorify white/black characters at the expense of black/white characters, that implies I hold some sort of belief or bias in favor white/black people and against black/white people IRL)."
07mk
8mo ago
Given that time I had my purse robbed by some little bitch of a thief in a shopping centre, leaving me literally penniless with no way home, I am quite happy to spend more on enforcing zero X theft than just 'allowing' a few harmless 'victimless' thefts.
Are you engaging with what "zero X theft" actually means, though? That's not "vanishingly small number of X thefts," which could possibly be accomplished by scaling up the current enforcement mechanisms by a few factors or a few orders of magnitude. That's zero theft of X, which for purses or bikes would likely mean something like having full coverage surveillance of all public areas (and most private areas) at all times, and furthermore those policemen or security guards would also need full surveillance to prevent corruption, bribery, etc. Of course those people also need surveillance to prevent corruption as well and so on and so forth. On top of all the regular training needed. We'd probably need to commit a substantial majority of our population just to law enforcement. Even after all that, I'm not sure that zero X theft for something like purses or bikes is a likely outcome. It's really difficult to build a truly perfect system with literally zero failures in anything but the most trivial circumstances, and society-wide theft is very far from trivial.
If we call for anything short of that (and possibly even if we do call for all that I described above), that means we are fully admitting that we are completely okay with and accepting of some nonzero level of X theft in our society, even if each and every individual occurrence of such theft is an injustice that we seek to prevent.
07mk
8mo ago
The psychological cost of living as red picker vs. the cost of dying as a blue-picker.
It didn't occur to me until reading this, but also there's the possibility of the psychological cost of living as a blue-picker - which is the knowledge (at least with very high confidence) that I futilely risked my life for no gain. The odds that my vote was the decisive one that brought blue from 49.99% to 50.00% or whatever is minuscule, which means that, almost certainly, regardless of what I picked, all the blue pickers were going to live anyway. My picking blue meant nothing in terms of causing good, but I was able to manipulate my brain into convincing myself that it was worth it to pay the real cost of a real fear of real risk of dying, when removing that fear was as simple as picking a different color which, again, would have caused no negative consequences.
07mk
1yr ago
That's a perfectly cromulent view, but then the argument about Murphy's view becomes very different. Notably,
Since she has changed her beliefs over time, I think that's pretty strong evidence that her beliefs can indeed still be changed over time based on the evidence she sees in her life, so her convictions are not a dragon
is misleading; the reasoning that "since she has changed beliefs over time" is misleadingly over-specific, and rather the reasoning would be "since it is impossible for anyone to have dragon beliefs, her convictions are not a dragon." It's a categorical denial based on the human condition rather than a denial based on Murphy's specific circumstances.
Furthermore, even under this framework, we could just re-label a "dragon" belief as "a teapot belief that reaches a certain level of threshold of being close a true dragon belief," and the arguments would remain the same. Perhaps Murphy's belief isn't a "dragon" but rather a "teapot," and there could theoretically be some evidence that changes her mind, but she has openly stated that she doesn't believe that to be the case, and she behaves in a way consistent with that belief. As a result, for all intents and purposes, her "teapot" belief is sufficiently close to a "dragon" belief to treat it as the latter.
07mk
1yr ago
That's very fair. Perhaps it's accidentally misleading in certain contexts, but at worst it's probably an unfortunate coincidence.
07mk
1yr ago
I'm just saying that, due to the filtering effect of honors classes, they're generally going to consist of students who are higher in general intelligence than the broader student population at the given school and grade.
I'm inclined to agree, as long as you're saying that the average intelligence is higher. Maybe that's too much of a nitpick, but certainly there would be overlap in the distributions of general intelligence in honors and regular classes.
100% agreed, and I don't think you're nitpicking at all, only clarifying. I probably should have written it out like that myself, but I generally take it for granted, because generally it's taken as a given when talking about intelligence - or more broadly any sort of traits with differences between groups - that the claim is only about differences in averages, with almost always large overlap between groups. It's not bad to write it out explicitly, though.
I'd rather use standardized tests for this, wouldn't you? Or a combination of standardized tests and nomination by teachers of students with merit? Teachers have all kinds of biases, and some teachers are terrible (many teachers awesome).
Also 100% agreed. Teachers are better than nothing, but that's a low bar. Standardized tests certainly have their own issues as well, but IMHO those issues are typically lesser than the issues with teachers and their biases (and/or plain incompetence), and schooling in general would be improved with a greater emphasis on standardized testing for figuring out where to place students.
07mk
1yr ago
If I'm understanding your position correctly, you're saying that the primary driver for students taking honors classes is their general intelligence?
No, you understand incorrectly. I'm not making any statement about the primary driver. I'm not sure if it's even possible to do the research to figure out what the primary driver is, so I'm not sure how you're concluding that social factors rather than general intelligence or something else altogether is a bigger driver. I'm just saying that, due to the filtering effect of honors classes, they're generally going to consist of students who are higher in general intelligence than the broader student population at the given school and grade. Teachers aren't perfect at gauging a student's potential ability to make use of honors classes, but I believe they're better than chance.
07mk
1yr ago
I think it's more of a question of whether or not statistics was learned there rather than whether or not it was taught there. I'm reminded of the saying that you can take a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
07mk
1yr ago
Sorry, I think this must be a reference to something, but I don't understand it. I had to Google what a longhouse was and, as I had initially guessed, it seems to be a house that is long. But I'm guessing you're referring to something more specific.
07mk
1yr ago
The sense that I get is that this can't possibly work that way, because women are the ones who define what "defective" means. By definition, 0% of women are defective, and X% of men are defective as determined by the judgments of the women which play out in whether or not one of the women chose to marry the man. I think this underlies most of the discussion on this topic, and trying to reason why those X% of men might have negative character traits is just a long-winded way of trying to avoid recognizing this. Those men are defective, by definition, but for whatever reason, people in our society don't like to think of ourselves as judging people as "defective" based purely on their romantic success, and so we come up with other reasons to justify this judgment that avoids the obvious answer.
07mk
1yr ago
The simulated “brain” that simulates the heart is a simulation of the brain and the heart.
This seems reasonable. And, again, going off this statement, it renders your original statement below completely wrong:
To have qualia you would have to simulate more than a brain, as qualia isn’t just felt or (in many cases) felt at all in the brain.
Because then we don't need to simulate more than the brain; we just need to simulate a brain which also simulates a heart (as in, the simulated brain creates the qualia of feeling a heart, without the programmers actually simulating a heart). So whether or not programmers simulated a brain AND a heart (AND a stomach and any other organ one might say is involved in qualia or feelings) really doesn't matter for the question of whether or not a simulated brain can have qualia. A simulated brain could just simulate those things.
07mk
1yr ago
It seems to me that there's more reason to be confident that one is not mistaken about the belief that one's laptop won't transform into a dragon than to be confident that one is not mistaken about the belief that someone else's consciousness is contingent on the physical analogy between one's own brain and their brain, though. We have some pretty deep level of understanding of the physics of a laptop and creatures like dragons and how they relate to each other based on our studies of things like plastic and metal and reptiles. We might be mistaken, but I think we've reduced the error bars quite a bit. I don't know that we can say the same for our study of how consciousness arises.
07mk
1yr ago
That is quite reasonable and basically matches my own beliefs on the matter, but what if you are mistaken in your belief that my being conscious has that much to do with the physiological analogy between yourself and myself? I don't think we know if you're mistaken on that, and I'm not sure it's even possible to find out right now.
07mk
1yr ago
Eh, if no one's ever seen him or etc, and the claim is made by someone known to be unreliable..
Neither of these seem like particularly difficult barriers to being believed in a claim like this.
07mk
1yr ago
Not really, unless you count ideas as reality, in which case everyone is dualist. Those ideas don't exist, they are just ideas. Does the word "purple" exist? Because really there are no words, there are just vibrations travelling through the air and patterns on screens and on paper.
Yes, words are many things, including vibrations traveling through the air, patterns on screens and on paper, and probably most importantly, experiences that come about as a consequence of atoms behaving in such a way as to cause neurons to fire in people's brains.
The word "purple" exists because we have simply defined the concept to include the vibrations and the patterns. This has nothing to do with some immaterial realm of meaning or anything related to dualism.
Exactly. It has nothing to do with some immaterial realm of meaning or anything related to dualism. The word "purple" exists because a bunch of atoms interacting with each other caused the experience of "knowing" what "purple" is (or perhaps more accurately "agreeing" on what "purple" indicates).
Similarly, the category of "me" is whatever I want it to be, within reason. I think it makes sense to identify as "body, including brain, including thoughts arising from brain" but it also makes sense to identify as "body and personality." Creating a category doesn't mean implicitly endorsing dualism.
"Within reason" is doing a ton of work here. Yes, it makes sense to identify as "body and personality," but when that "personality" is separate from the physical body that is the cause of that personality, then that's breaking the bounds of reason. Creating a fantastical category that's unbounded from physical reality and then identifying oneself - the literal human being operating in reality, not just some abstract concept that is free to explore the multiverse of fantastical fiction - as fitting that category is implicitly endorsing dualism.
07mk
1yr ago
One can respect people who are not one's equals yes, but I think this is conditional on one not thinking very often, or at all, of the ways in which one is superior, particularly if intellect is the disparity.
I don't think this is true at all, and I don't see any reason why it would be true.
Which suggests a way forward here, since it doesn't seem like individualism will be making a comeback: the truth about black IQ can't be in the water supply. It probably can only be safely handled in the ivory tower, though even there there's a vigorous effort to squelch it.
I disagree with both sentences here. Despite all the efforts by extremists on both (all) sides of the political spectrum, individualism is still around, even if weakened, and the idea that truth about IQ could only be handled safely in the ivory tower just seems like baseless scaremongering.
07mk
1yr ago
If it is the case that such words really do have magical properties, then using them in front of impressionable children will demonstrate the magic - i.e. someone will mess your life up for using them - and children would notice that and learn of those magical properties. If using them doesn't result in such messing up happening, then it would demonstrate that, No, those words don't have magical properties, and there are contexts when they can be used without people messing you up. Impressionable children wouldn't necessarily pick up on those contexts, but I posit that (1) information about taboos around slurs is so plentiful anyway that watching/reading some adult use them has minimal impact and (2) children get much more leeway in breaking such taboos due to their natural lack of experience and maturity and learning the right contexts when to use such terms through experience and experimentation is part of growing up.
07mk
1yr ago
It isn't like "a better way to make cheesecake", where the AI is churning out industrial-recipe amounts in an industrial process. It's reducing creativity and imagination to a set of standard tropes for lowest common denominator appeal, like the production line of Marvel movies which, I think, people are beginning to get tired of because it's all too much and too the same
(Emphasis added). I'm not sure where the bolded part came from. What reason is there to believe that AIs would reduce creativity or imagination to a set of standard tropes for lowest common denominator appeal? Nothing about the actual process of the creation of art by AI would imply that. If we look at usage of AI in other fields like, say, go or chess, AI has been known to display creativity far beyond what the best humans have been known to come up with.
07mk
1yr ago
Yes. Given how easy it is for someone to die just by hitting their head on the ground from a simple fall, if someone's rushing you with clear intent to harm, then that means either they've decided that your life is forfeit or that they've recklessly disregarded the value of you staying alive. Either way, this entitles you to defend yourself with deadly force in my view. Obviously kids should be arrested and punished for blowing up someone else's property, but getting your property blown up doesn't entitle you to carry out that punishment yourself.
I've never heard of this stereotype. Or, tbh, any stereotype about sexual fantasies involving tomboys. I don't really know any other people who are into tomboys, but I am someone who's into tomboys, and that stereotype is the opposite of what I would consider a satisfying sexual fantasy about a tomboy; the reason I'm attracted to a tomboy is that she has those boyish features, like short hair, small breasts (this is a preference I hold for non-tomboys as well), perhaps slightly muscular build, along with engaging in more masculine activities with her, such as sports or video games. I'd find the notion of a girly girl "maturing" into a tomboy-ish woman (though obviously that asset growth only goes one way, so it'd be just a matter of minimal growth rather than reduction) far more sexually appealing than the other way around.
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