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.
07mk
1yr ago
IANAL, but what laws would you expect to be in the books that that would violate?
07mk
1yr ago
This is something that gets me as well. I wager if you asked the person from MLive Media who wrote that statement to choose to become a Nazi right now, in the sense that he truly, in his heart of hearts, believed that Jews were sub-humans who ought to be exterminated, he couldn't do it, even under threat of death or torture. The best he could do is to play-act the role. I don't see why this would be any different for Scott Adams's views about black people or anyone's views about anything.
This does cross into free will territory and applies more broadly to any sort of behavior. A bank robber didn't have the choice to have a brain that tells him that grabbing a gun and threatening tellers was a good way to make money, no more than Charles Whitman had a choice to have a tumor in his brain affecting his amygdala before he went on a killing spree in UT Austin.
Yet our society does treat these behaviors as being "choices" and hold the people carrying these out as agents responsible for the consequences of these "choices." And to a large extent, our society depends on this in order to function. People noticed that holding people accountable for their "choices" is helpful for making a more comfortable society to live in, likely through incentivizing - perhaps "manipulating" is just as good a term - people to behave in certain ways. The way I see it, the idea that these types of things are choices is a sort of legal fiction that society holds up as a means to make it function at all. And basically no one who created the fiction realized it was fiction, and same goes for people who follow the fiction.
And so we get to cases like here, where someone like Scott Adams is excoriated for daring to "choose" his views. The person is just acting out the fictional thing that our society agreed on to treat as fact; he doesn't like Scott Adams's behavior and wants less of it, so he incentivizes less of it in society by punishing Scott Adams for doing that behavior, while invoking that fiction as the justification.
07mk
1yr ago
Mmm, this seems to be splitting hairs to me. The legal nuance seems fine considering the original statement referred explicitly to an "attorney." If we were litigating over a physician, it would seem fair for the follow on sentence to editorialize with medical qualifications.
No. Claiming that one is "diminishing the qualifications of an attorney" implies something very different from claiming that one is "criticizing her legal qualifications." The former brings to mind her quality as an attorney; the latter brings to mind actual legal qualifications.
Of course, there's barely enough plausible deniability there that someone who is sufficiently motivated could believe that the 2 phrases are similar enough that it's just an innocuous rephrasing. And that's what makes it so slimy, because (intentionally or not) they're relying on that plausible deniability.
NYT chose to make a more falsifiable statement using the word criticize, and I think the inclusion advanced rather than diminished the average reader's comprehension.
No. NYT's sentence here was in response to what the spokeswoman Espinoza said. Espinoza claimed something about what Politico wrote - it might be true, it might be false, it might be misleading, but what she claimed is what she claimed - and NYT commented on a different but related thing that Politico could have done (an didn't do). This muddles things - either they're misleading the reader by changing the topic without notifying them or they're misleading themselves by believing that they can read minds and figure out that when Espinoza claimed that Politico "diminish[ed her] qualifications" what she really meant was that Politico "criticized her legal qualifications." Either way, it's bad journalism and slimy.
If the writer wanted to contradict Espinoza in an open and honest way, he could have asked her for clarification and/or examples and then analyzed Politico's statements on those grounds. Or just stuck to the original meaning of what Espinoza claimed.
07mk
2mo 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
6mo ago
Yes Israel has an obligation not to commit war crimes on a mountainous scale.
This was in response to the question:
Does Israel have an obligation to send water or electricity to Gaza?
This seems to imply that Israel not sending water or electricity to Gaza is the committing of war crimes on a mountainous scale. Could you clarify what the connection is here? I'm not that familiar with actual war crimes (i.e. in the sense of actual treaties and laws around what nations are allowed to do to each other's combatants and such), so I'm guessing there must be some international treaty that gives Israel that obligation to send water or electricity to Gaza, and I'm wondering what that is.
07mk
7mo ago
The OP is clearly saying you cannot infer anything about their beliefs or worldview on the basis of the mods they play. That is what I don't agree with. Those are not trivial things.
Indeed, and I agree with the OP and disagree with you. "Anything about their beliefs or worldview" is different from "anything [at all]." The deliberate choices one makes when modding falls into the latter category but not in the former category. E.g. if someone decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, it tells us that that person decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, which falls into the latter, but not the former. I doubt the OP would disagree with the notion that a modder deciding to change some pixels from brown to beige tells us that the modder decided to change those pixels from brown to beige, but he can speak for himself, I suppose.
Not every possible explanation is equally possible. I don't think people are missing the fact that the mod they were downloading, in the SV example, was explicitly about making a black character white. That context matters. Is it by itself enough to say a person is racist? Maybe not. But it does make it more likely.
Does it? It's possible that it does, but I dispute that you can believe with any meaningful level of confidence that it does make it more likely. This is the kind of nice-sounding narrative that intuitively makes sense and sounds plausible, and as such, if we believe it without doing the hard empirical work to check that it's true, then we should be highly suspicious that our belief in it is due to how plausible it sounds and how much it is in concordance with our intuitions, rather than how true it is. Again, in that SV example, it is, by itself, absolutely not enough to say the person is racist. Is it enough to imply that that modder is more likely to be racist than the typical SV modder or player? It might be, and it might not be, and we haven't done the hard empirical work to figure out which.
07mk
10mo ago
Now I may be a simple country hyperchicken, but it seems to me that Spider-Verse also featured a black main character. Seems like an odd comparison to make, given their narrative.
Spider-Verse's black protagonist is a character who has always been black starting with his original incarnation, AFAIK. Ariel in the original adaptation in 1989 was a ginger, and in the remake is black. So possibly Chinese audiences are rejecting the race-swapping of existing non-black characters to be black, rather than rejecting black characters in themselves. This rejection of such race-swapping is considered anti-black racism just as much as rejection of black characters in themselves by the "woke" ideology.
07mk
11mo ago
There's no such thing as "just" telling people to not drink Bud Light, the context of doing so is common knowledge.
I don't think that means there isn't "just" telling people not to drink Bud Light or shop at Target or whatever. It just means that when you "just" tell people to do that, you also necessarily include the context of the common knowledge. That doesn't make a message to Christians to boycott Bud Light not "just" telling people not to drink Bud Light; that's still literally "just" what it is.
07mk
11mo ago
Similarly, in societal terms, if I’m a recruiter trying to hire for a white-collar job, and I have to make a decision based on limited information, I would have to be a complete moron - or a liberal ideologue - not to utilize my understanding of probabilities gained from observation of previous outcomes.
I don't think there's a magic bullet solution, but this is why I think legally mandated moronicism - so that everyone is equally a complete moron in this respect - accompanied with increased legibility into individual competence is the right approach. There should never be a case where someone's name or race is the only information given to you as a recruiter/hirer, and it should be punishable if you make some meaningful consequential decision in the case that somehow that were the only information given to you.
07mk
1yr ago
It’s interesting because iirc there is very little to no evidence that transmen taking male hormones makes them more violent (eg. the rate of transmen prisoners, when controlled for the usual factors, is similar to the rate for cis women), even though testosterone is linked to criminal behavior and is generally believed to be a reason men are more violent than women.
Is this also controlled for women tending to get lower sentences than men for similar crimes? I would (wildly) guess that both FTM and MTF would gain some of this advantage, though FTM would gain more. I've anecdotally heard of FTM transmen becoming better at spacial math and more horny (including both from NPR of all places), so I wouldn't be surprised if FTM transmen also experienced increase in aggression to be more like males, though I would also guess that without going through male adolescence, that the level of violence inflicted would be lower on average due to lower strength, even if they had exactly as much of a tendency towards violence as males.
Again, anecdotal and wild guesses, but I'm also guessing that there just isn't much knowledge on this at all due to a dearth of trans people in general on which to do research on this type of stuff.
07mk
1yr ago
But what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
Less pithily, if you want to suggest that the OP was framing things in a misleading way, likely in a naked attempt to fit things into a false narrative he prefers, that seems perfectly cromulent and also likely correct, and I didn't need you to help me figure that out. That's still a very very far cry from stoking outrage.
07mk
1yr ago
OK, I'm genuinely curious then: if, say, during pre-Civil Rights America some black constituents complained to their mayor about the segregation at the public pool and the mayor decided to prioritize his white constituents' desires not to interact with blacks over the black constituents' desires to use those pool facilities, then black constituents have no grounds to complain that the mayor is not representing black constituents? It seems that, from your posts here, that by your lights, the answer is absolutely Yes, there is no way to state that this mayor is being unrepresentative of black constituents, only that he's poorly representing them. Which then would raise the question: what is the meaningful difference, by your lights, between being unrepresented and being poorly represented, where the rubber meets the road, i.e. actual impactful policy changes implemented by those in power?
07mk
1mo ago
The ginger genocide (aside: this phenomenon + the anagram is probably the strongest evidence for the simulation hypothesis I've encountered) is a fair point, but my perception of this is that even the very phenomenon is little known outside of fairly niche circles of people who pay attention to this kind of thing, and even those who know don't often realize that this is endemic in the industry, with Zendaya's MJ being just one example. It's not nothing, but I don't recall it rising to even the level of Tilda Swinton's Ancient One in Doctor Strange (aside: any sort of race/sex swapping is justified if it's to get Tilda Swinton to play the character), much less, say, Ariel from The Little Mermaid (another example of the ginger genocide! And generally talked about on its own instead of part of the larger trend). Maybe MJ's case is due to the complete victory by one side, but honestly I thought it was more like Nick Fury where people just didn't care much since it's a supporting character whose race isn't much of a factor in the story.
07mk
4mo ago
Sure, it can. But is "the Government decisions have made a major impact on the Company's ability to do business" any more clear in meaning than "the government decisions have made a major impact on the company's ability to do business"? No, obviously not. It's an irritating stylistic quirk that doesn't aid in conveying one's meaning at all.
Hard disagree. If this were some sort of essay or some excerpt from a book, I would agree with you completely. But if this is for some sort of report that's being written for work, then consistently capitalizing Government and Company like this would greatly aid in clarity and comprehension when reading the document. Now, if it's inconsistent or one-off, then yeah, that's strictly worse than just using proper capitalization. But if it's consistent, that aids in comprehension speed greatly in my experience.
07mk
4mo ago
That's the beauty of polygamy, he won't leave you for a newer model! The newer model just comes in and raises his status which means it also raises your status (while also lowering your status relatively due to having to share with one more woman; whether this is a net gain or loss depends a lot on the details).
07mk
6mo ago
I don't think it's possible to know that Hamas's self-promotions using videos directly showing their terrorism in action had a net positive or negative effect for their support in the West, but I think it's at least clear that it didn't cause some major backlash. Which is still interesting in itself.
As someone who had a similar mentality on September 12, 2001, I think there's some truth to the "blank slate" explanation. The thinking was immediately, "How badly did Osama Bin Laden and his Musli compatriots be abused by the American empire that they felt helpless to do anything but to hijack planes and murder thousands of people? The depths of evil to which these people were pushed to do shows just how evil America is to the rest of the world, and perhaps those individuals who were murdered didn't deserve it, but America as a whole clearly deserved what happened yesterday." I see something similar happening with the narrative here.
But I don't think it's right to call it "blank slate," because that implies some sort of genetic explanation. I don't think it's a matter of genetics, but of religion. What I think I was missing as a teenager back then was the religious context and the understanding that many people take their religion VERY seriously, in a way that's almost beyond comprehension for someone like me who was raised atheist in a secular environment. That plus cultural relativism makes it easy to characterize anyone as a freedom fighter.
I'm also wondering what it would have been like if 9/11 happened in this era of smartphones and cheap Internet on planes. What if Al Qaeda livestreamed the events, including in-cockpit views of the planes all the way to the moments of the crashes? And passengers too would have livestreamed so many streams with different angles and such. It would also include the whole "Let's roll" incident that I believe led to the crash of one of the planes before it could hit a Washington DC target. I could see these being morale boosters both for the doves and the hawks immediately following the attacks, and I'm not sure what direction things would've changed, if at all.
07mk
8mo ago
I can't imagine a more sympathetic to human realities to this concept, and am really baffled by the person who would put 'liberal fairness' on such a pedestal that they would get remotely worked up at the idea of supporting marriages / families, the fundamental social unit of society.
The notion that we ought to support marriages/families as the fundamental social unit of society in favor over liberal fairness didn't really occur to me when I read this top post, but after reading this post and georgioz's below, I wonder if it'd be quite possible to hit both targets just by offering a spousal stipend. Instead of spending money filling a role with a compromise candidate who got bonus points due to nepotism, give the money to the spouse to just do whatever with. This would leave the spouse free to pursue homemaking or other marriage/family-related endeavors.
Of course, then the university still needs to find and pay someone (presumably more qualified) to fill the role the spouse would have filled. So the stipend could be less than what the salary would have been; in exchange, the spouse has no work obligations to the university, and so is free to get a part-time job if they need to make up for the difference compared to what a salary would've given them, while still giving them more time to spend on marriage/family-related endeavors. In terms of supporting marriage and family, having one spouse with substantial time not committed to full-time work so they can pursue this stuff seems quite a lot better than just having the couple working at the same place.
07mk
11mo ago
This seems like quibbling over the definition of "Just".
I mean, yes. That's what the whole subthread is about, starting with the claim that the statement was "blatantly false" in the comment to which I was responding. I don't think it's blatantly false. You could say that it's arguably misleading, especially in the context of a Christian boycott of Bud Light and Target being clear "enemy action" from the perspective of partisan Reddit mods, but if there's room to quibble over the words - and there is such room - then it's not the case that it's blatantly false.
07mk
1yr ago
No. I'm saying that it's entirely possible for Politico to have diminished Lawrence-Hardy's qualifications without criticizing her legal qualifications, and it's misleading to state as if them not criticizing her legal qualifications has any implication on the spokeswoman's claim that Politico diminished Lawrence-Hardy's qualifications. I'm ignorant of the specific statements Politico made, but presuming accuracy from NYTimes, my conclusion is that no one at Politico called out Lawrence-Hardy for not having the qualifications to be a lawyer. If I want to figure out if the spokeswoman's claim about Politico was true, then this NYTimes article doesn't help me other than pointing me in the direction of the primary source. Which would be all fine and good, if the NYTimes article didn't also strongly hint that the spokeswoman's claim about Politico were false while still avoiding explicitly saying it.
07mk
1yr ago
This post seems like it's culture war waging and doesn't belong here. However, I wanted to say that I love this passage as a beautiful description of what practicing to develop drawing skills (or really, any kind of physical skills) really is, on a fundamental level.
For a mangaka, «fish-eye» means years of wrestling with built-in visual cognitive biases, painstaking fiddling in awkward 2D, selecting, combining and projecting primitives, generating and tracking pencil trajectories, iterating a loop of deliberately memorized algorithms with elements of pseudorandom – assembling a cognitive chimera from the elements of thought amenable to control.
07mk
1mo ago
Famed fitness expert Steven Crowder answered this question for us 7 years ago.
07mk
1mo ago
Chris Hemsworth is a Hollywood star with a physique that's out of reach for almost anyone. Someone with his exact same physique but not his stardom also wouldn't turn nearly as many heads. "Look what they need to mimic just a fraction of our power" is a quotation that comes to mind.
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.
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