07mk
5mo ago
But that's qualitatively different from such a containment thread. The posts in such a containment thread would be determined by things like: what type of person would enjoy posting/reading in such a thread, what type of prompts would such people use, what LLMs such people would choose to use, and what text output such people would deem as meeting the threshold of being good enough to share in such a thread. You'd get none of that by simulating a forum via LLM by yourself.
07mk
5mo ago
You had to add on a whole lot of details to the chess example, though. What about someone who has only ever played chess in private against bots and continues to do so indefinitely? Do such people exist? How would we know? I certainly know that I play some single player computer games like that, in ways that literally no other human being on Earth knows that I've played that game, which means that I leave behind no evidence that I played these games regardless of social validation. And my stating that I play games like that could serve as a proof-by-construction that I actually played those games out of a desire for social validation, as a way to have something like this in my back pocket to bring up as an example in a social interaction with someone else.
To me, your analysis seems isomorphic to those who claim that literally everything is political, on the basis that, no matter what topic they're given, they're able to use some chain of logic to connect it to some form of politics. If the bar to cross for being "political" is that someone can make a logical chain that connects it to politics, then the term "political" becomes vapid. Likewise, if all that takes for someone playing some game to be "about social validation" is that you can create some logical chain that explains how that person could be influenced by social validation in some indirect way connected to the game, then "being about social validation" becomes vapid.
07mk
6mo ago
It is, when taken in context with the rest of the statement.
No, it's still false while taking the context of your statement and the entire comment thread here.
The claim is that creative expression cannot exist since the player interacts with the programming to create the "work." Therefore, the programmer cannot say what the creative expression "is" any more than the coder of tax preparation software can say his program has "artistic meaning" without the user inputing values, or any more than the designer of a car's ignition system can say his diagram is "artistic expression."
But this claim is, again, simply wrong. So what if the player interacts with the programming to create the "work?" The creative expression of the creator of the software is the boundaries that are set on how the player can interact with the programming. As long as the player isn't hacking the game, no matter what choices the player makes while playing the game, the player's choices are within the boundaries that are the creative expression of the game devs.
07mk
7mo ago
Well, if by “visceral response” you mean “heuristic.”
I don't. By "visceral response," I mean a sort of automatic, subconscious, emotional response. A heuristic is something else, which you outline below:
Hearing someone choose the word “females” usually says a lot about their worldview.
But... it doesn't. Referring to women as "females" is just accurate, mainstream, correct use of that word. Claiming that only people with a certain type of worldview tend to use this word that way, and as such, forms a meaningful heuristic with respect to how to react to such usage, is, again, something that appears as motivated reasoning. I've yet to encounter a shred of evidence that usage of the word that way has any correlation with the speaker's worldview, or evidence that anyone has even attempted to collect such evidence.
This is in contrast to terms like "male fantasy" or "male privilege," which are well-known terms from a certain specific well-known ideology or cluster of ideologies. It's certainly possible for people to use those phrases in a way that doesn't invoke those ideologies, but the very concept of characterizing individuals as having "privilege" based on their group identity with respect to sex is something that relates to those ideologies.
07mk
11mo ago
As best as I can tell, voting for a third party candidate is about as worthless as any other vote in this context. The odds that my one vote is what takes some third party candidate up from 4.99% to 5.00% or whatever the threshold is is astronomically low. The odds that my one vote takes the candidate's vote count across some threshold such that it allows the party to garner greater clout in some meaningful, true way is much higher, since there are many many such thresholds, but it's still astronomically small.
07mk
1yr ago
FWIW, I don't think the description of the movie's climax being the one holdout being "proven" wrong is incorrect. The holdout was "proven" wrong throughout the course of the film during which the jurors discuss the case, go over the evidence, and even mime out scenarios of what might have happened, which all introduce reasonable doubt (what constitutes "reasonable" is obviously subjective, but the film presents the doubt as a reasonable conclusion that the other jurors reach based on the evidence). The climax involving the one holdout finally relenting actually alludes to that holdout being unreasonably emotional due to past personal experiences haunting him. By the time any sort of ostracization was happening, it was obvious to all 12 jurors, including the one holdout, that the evidence pointed to there being reasonable doubt, and it was his emotional, irrational insistence in sticking with the guilty verdict regardless that was causing the other jurors to treat him this way.
07mk
1yr ago
I came to similar conclusions as you a long time ago without much disillusionment about politics because of the simple math of voting: the only way that my vote matters in terms of who gets elected is if one of the elections in which I voted was decided by exactly 1 vote, after all the recounts and such, and the odds of that happening are so astronomically small that the very real guaranteed cost of taking the time and effort to go to a place to vote or to fill out a form and mail it in aren't worth it. However, I voted in the 2016 and 2020 US elections for 2 different reasons, which you might find compelling.
First of all, I don't think I'm a very good liar, so I wanted to place myself in a situation that I wouldn't have to lie convincingly. Given that, I wanted to honestly be able to say that I voted for the first woman president of the United States merely for the historic reasons (whether or not I think the whole "first person of [x] in position [y]" should be historic, it is historic) which is why I voted in 2016. Didn't quite work out that way, but the chance of positive upside seemed worth the cost. In 2020, I voted for Biden, because I wanted to be able to honestly say that I helped to vote out Donald Trump from the White House, lest I face severe negative consequences from people who consider not voting against Trump to be a mortal sin. Of course, the exact mirror situation could happen with people considering not voting for Trump to be a mortal sin, but my own assessment of my risk was that Biden supporters were far more likely to enact such negative consequences on me than Trump supporters. I'm not sure I'll vote for Biden again this year rather than abstaining like I did in 2012, since the fervor to keep Biden in the White House while preventing Trump from getting back in, for some reason, doesn't feel as strong now as the fervor to knock Trump out of the White House in 2020 (I'm guessing that Covid & the riots of that year probably had a lot to do with it).
07mk
1yr ago
t's kinda funny that 5 (or 5 Royal specifically I suppose) is the best Persona game mechanically (in my mind anyway), but that as I play backwards through the older games I feel like the PThieves are the least interesting characters. I feel like 3 and 4 have the group dynamics nailed down better. Plus Koromaru > Sparkly Bishie Teddie > Teddie >>>>>>>>> Morgana, you can't change my mind on the animal/mascot party member tier list. I am very grateful that they brought Baton Pass Shift over from 5, not having it in Golden was a bit of a learning curve.
Interesting, I've only played 3 & 4, and I'd compare 4 to 3 like how you compared 5 to 4/3 - mechanically, 4 Golden was basically the perfection of the 3/4 gameplay formula, but it was hampered by the fact that the characters just weren't as good as in 3. I also preferred the darker tone and themes of 3, though perhaps the story is mostly a wash, since 3 kinda dragged in the 2nd half while 4 had solid pacing with its murder mysteries throughout.
Kinda sad to hear that P3R suffered from being too close to the source material, according to a lot of people. It really would've been great if it had combined the best of the gameplay the series had to offer with the best of the characters and perhaps tightened up the story. But perhaps the exclusion of FeMC and the Answer portion from FES was a sign that this was more of a cash grab than an attempt to create the definitive version of the game (obviously any remake is a cash grab, but there's a spectrum).
07mk
1yr ago
I couldn't make it thru one playthrough either, but not because of whatever ideologies it was trying to sell. It was just the uninteresting, unlikeable characters that gave me no investment in figuring out the murder. I found the setting very boring, too, so exploring the area and meeting its various inhabitants and witnesses was just a drag. I can only imagine how bad the writing must've gotten later on as the story developed and the characters had time to breathe, because the writing started off very stilted and unnatural and only seemed to get worse as I kept playing. Shame, since the RPG system for investigation/interrogation/other detective work seemed pretty neat.
07mk
1yr ago
I'm a huge fan of beer, wine, and particularly whiskey, but I'm with /u/SubstantialFrivolity personally on that alcohol doesn't enhance the experience of eating foods, except for the intrinsic quality of the drink itself. Like, it's nice to eat beer with a burger at a bbq or have Margaritas with burritos or even red wine with chicken parm, but I see those as more aesthetic preferences than anything about the way the tastes go together. Same reason why I prefer to have East Asian-looking servers when I go to a Korean restaurant.
I'd say being drunk can sometimes increase the sense of hunger I feel, which indirectly makes the experience of eating foods better, but in terms of the influence on the direct experience of the taste, it actually dulls it, if anything.
07mk
1yr ago
If you think it's political/religious force that is important, then, stupid question here, but can't we just futz with that with our magic futzing machine?
But we'd also need the political/religious will and force to develop and use this magic futzing machine to change the population's political/religious preferences such that those political/religious preferences compel them to want to (re-)use the magic futzing machine to make women tolerant of losing abundant sexual access outside of marriage. I see this as moving the issue back a step.
07mk
1yr ago
That's a fair point, that one could genetically engineer people's sense of "intolerability." I do think there would have to be some sort of significant political/religious will behind developing and executing that kind of genetic engineering at a population level which would also of course be required for things like making women less hypergamous, etc. or changing birth sex ratios. I suppose my belief is that the political/religious force required to develop and implement the genetic engineering to make women more tolerant of losing abundant sexual access outside of marriage would be significantly more than what's required to implement the genetic engineering to make them slightly more male-like in their sexuality.
But you are correct that accurately predicting cultural progression is very hard. My own belief is probably mostly informed by my own lifetime experience of noticing how cultural progression always seems to go. But that's anecdotal and should be valued as much.
07mk
1yr ago
This was a private school, located in (what I as an adult now recognize as) a quite wealthy neighborhood in Cambridge, MA. FWIW, I do recall we were specifically encourage to masturbate for health reasons (specifically no STD & no pregnancy - any other benefits such as pleasure or whatever weren't mentioned IIRC), but I don't think any actual explicit instructions were provided, either orally or visually.
Your line does seem reasonable, but it also does seem like one that's hard to maintain from the current hegemonic belief that pregnancy and bonding with a partner are merely a couple of optional consequences one can freely choose to get or not from sex. That mostly just leaves the pleasure portion, and not covering that, along with the many now-mainstream techniques for accomplishing those, would leave a big gaping hole in the education that the internet can rush to fill (less of an issue in the 90s).
07mk
1yr ago
You're playing a DMC game on mouse and keyboard? That's probably a tougher challenge than trying to beat it in Dante Must Die difficulty with a controller. I thought DMC5 felt a lot like DMC3 in terms of the combat system including the rolls, but obviously with a lot of extra complexities in part due to having 2 other characters than Dante. One thing is that Dante by default in DMC3 had a dash due to defaulting to his Trickster style, but Nero and V don't have access to that and can only dodge by doing a lock-on roll.
07mk
1yr ago
I’ve abstained from masturbating for a few days before seeing her and it still happens—other times I’m fine but we can’t have sex for various reasons.
I masturbate every 2-3 days.
Hm, I'm no expert on this, but what's the longest you've abstained before attempting? My intuition is that 2-3 days just isn't all that long to build up... whatever it is that gets built up. I'd consider abstaining a minimum of a week, perhaps 2+, before the next attempt. If sexual times with her happens more often than that, then just stop masturbating altogether; you seem to have enough self control to quit porn for 2+ months, after all. And if you know that the only way you're getting off is with her, your body might find the motivation to step up at the opportunity.
07mk
1yr ago
I just think the idea of US citizens having access to uncensored LLMs at close to SOTA quality will be considered far more dangerous than weapons (short of nukes, though even then...), meth, and counterfeit money.
Then again, perhaps a cyber-based defense is more likely than nukes. Perhaps we'll get a Great Firewall of America to keep Americans from surreptitiously accessing the NK LLM. And equivalents in other nations too. But that has its own issues in implementing, of course.
07mk
1yr ago
I just don't understand why people continue to put so much effort into making the experience of drinking something more painful and more likely to cause bloating and gas. With beer, I see the carbonation as an acceptable consequence of the brewing process that also serves as a helpful way of enforcing a speed limit in taking in the alcohol. But with soft drinks, neither excuse exists.
07mk
1yr ago
what do you think is more probable, that the Doomers saw Terminator in theaters when they were children or that they watched Anime related to AI doom?.
I mean, neither is particularly probable, since the popular/good Terminator films are rated R, and I don't really know of anime related to AI doom in a similar way. I don't think Doomers tended to get their inspiration from fiction they watched as children, though, since the narrative of the Doomers tend to be very different from the AI doom narratives seen in fiction.
but Doomers are not a majority of people and are, IMHO, very different from regular people.
that is a major disagreement we have there. To me Doomers and "rationalists" in general are just regular people very good at rationalizing their biases.
I don't see where the disagreement is. I believe that Doomers and rationalists in general (two different though overlapping sets of people) are just regular people very good at rationalizing their biases too. That doesn't mean that they're not very different from regular people, because "being very good at rationalizing one's biases" isn't the one and only characteristic that defines humans. Regular people don't tend to look into technology and try to project it decades into the future to predict where things will go, which is how Doomers seem to have come to their conclusions. Regular people tend not to have much interest in AI or robots or technology at all, where as Doomers almost by definition do.
Personally, I think Doomers, again, largely got inspiration from looking at technology and projecting it to the future in a way that is... rather hubristic or conceited. I'd call them a modern iteration of an apocalypse cult, much like idpol/SJW/CRT/wokeness/etc. is a modern iteration of a religion. It fulfills all the roles of such things while transforming just enough things to be convincing to modern educated people who consider themselves scientific and rational, since the old versions of these had too many characteristics that were too obviously incompatible with science; so they just made them less obvious. But I don't think either were inspired by The Terminator or other such works of scifi.
07mk
1yr ago
I'm with you. Given the general lack of success of media companies to manipulate the audience into having preferred beliefs through putting out content pushing preferred messages, and the likely fact that in porn, if anything, the audience tends to be more motivated by pure id than with media in general, flooding sites with this just doesn't seem likely to work at all. Like, I've heard people talk a lot about incest porn and also "extreme" porn involving choking women and such taking over porn in recent years, but as a pretty regular consumer consoomer coomer who doesn't enjoy such things, I barely ever run into such things by accident, and even less when I'm looking for something specific. In fact, I don't think I've seen a single porn video of a woman being choked. Incest and pseudo-incest porn, it's easier to accidentally encounter, but also very easy to just find a near-equivalent video without it. It's just not that hard to avoid porn you're not into.
07mk
1yr ago
Right, a majority of people think of Arnold or HAL, but Doomers are not a majority of people and are, IMHO, very different from regular people. Regular people don't really think about this stuff and just connect the superficial similarities between Terminator and AI Doom in the future, whereas AI Doomers seem to have arrived at their position by looking at actual current science, not science fiction, and extrapolating into the future in a way they find plausible. I think inspiration by fiction, whether that be The Terminator or anime, is a tiny factor when it comes to AI Doomers.
Also, I'm assuming AIM doesn't stand for AOL Instant Messenger, but I don't know what it refers to.
07mk
1yr ago
I think the issue is most people in favor of rent control policies don't understand the economic arguments against them. They have mistaken factual beliefs. They correctly perceive the first order effects of reducing rent for people covered by such policies and think it is desirable. I think it takes a pretty specific kind of economics education to see the prices as outputs of a system, rather than inputs, and reason from the implications of that.
The issue here, to me, is that then the obvious follow-up question is, Why do they have mistaken factual beliefs? Surely some of them are just stupid and others are just in situations of forced ignorance, but I doubt that that covers more than a tiny fraction of them. So that would leave most people who are choosing to remain ignorant of the truth, which leads them to false conclusions; but why would they do that? My pet theory isn't "gut instinct" about what sounds good or what sounds bad to oneself, but rather another sort of "gut instinct" about what belief makes one more praised and less punished in one's social world. And thus people figure out what to remain ignorant of, so as to control one's own beliefs in a way that is beneficial to their social well-being (this may look like Bulverism, but in this case, the fact that these people in this hypothetical are mistaken, i.e. wrong, was taken as the baseline, so talking about how and why they landed on this wrongness rather than whether they're wrong seems appropriate).
That said, my pet theory might just be equivalent to the original assertion about what "sounds good," since one of the most common ways that I can tell of someone learning how to control one's own beliefs in such a way as to increase praise and reduce punishment socially is to modulate what "sounds good" (in an intuitive, ethical sense) to oneself.
07mk
1yr ago
The main thing for me is that one of my ear canals has a tendency to have the ear wax slightly come loose, loose enough that I can hear crackling when I walk or chew, but not so loose that I can get it out either through hopping or my pinkie finger, which usually just packs it in harder, only to come loose later as I walk. I either have to use a Q-tip or just tolerate the crackling sound (which isn't actually all that bad, since I'm not walking or chewing most of the time).
07mk
1yr ago
False awakenings are fun and fascinating experiences. I used to have them here and there, though I haven't had one in a long time. I too had the habit of hitting the snooze button while in the half-awake state, and that half-awake state I think is a big factor in making these happen, along with the related phenomenon of lucid dreams.
I think there's a common idea, popularized in part by Inception, of dreams-within-dreams, where your dream-self falls asleep and dreams, and that dream-self can sleep and dream, and so forth, and when you awaken, you awaken to the previous dream layer, then awaken from that, and so forth, until you awaken to reality (presumably, anyway). I don't know how much research there is in this, but my pet theory is that it's nothing like that, and that it's all just one "layer" of dreaming. Dreams are, almost by definition, fictional experiences we have in our minds while we sleep, and at some point, we might have the fictional experience of awakening during the dream. This, when viewed retrospectively through our memories, then cleaves our dream to what came before that experience of awakening and what came after, with the former being the 2nd layer of dream, dream-within-a-dream. But, in fact, we hadn't fallen asleep while dreaming like how Leonardo DiCaprio's character fell asleep while riding a fictional van in a fictional cityscape contained within a dream in Inception. This would also be why we can shoot up multiple "levels" of dreams in a night and remember those (to whatever extent we remember dreams, which is a whole other issue), but we don't go down the "levels" by actively going to bed and falling asleep in a dream (at least, I haven't experienced this or heard other people mention this).
I've also independently slept through 3 separate alarms intentionally placed in 3 different places in my bedroom before, but not for reasons related to false awakenings. I just had bad sleeping habits and was a heavy sleeper.
07mk
1yr ago
Oh yes, I remember being in grade school when that happened. I suppose 9/11 must have left a bigger impression on me (which is probably unsurprising), because I recall being impressed that the building was still standing and seemed mostly fine except for that 1/3 that was obliterated.
Not really, no. This is the Secret Service, not Joe's Friendly Private Security and Handymen. They're supposed to be the best of the best, and, IIRC from the hearings, they have an explicit zero-failure standard that they hold themselves to. That's a high standard, and anyone who isn't prepared to meet it should not have been employed by it and certainly not have been leading it.
This would be relevant if this was an instance where the shooter used some clever difficult-to-detect method to circumvent protections. I wouldn't describe the assassination attempt as that.
More options
Context Copy link