07mk
2mo ago
No, it is not identical. I explained the significant difference in the above comment. DEI is specifically about adding diversity of things believed to be correlated with diversity of thought while this is an actual instance of directly adding diversity of thought. There's plenty to criticize about adding diversity of thought in this way, but it's categorically different from adding diversity of demographic characteristics under the belief that adding such diversity would increase diversity of thought.
07mk
4mo ago
I'm familiar with the concepts and metaphor you mention here. Could you outline how that applies to this situation? The Constitution is just a piece of paper, much like Executive Orders by the POTUS are - they only mean things insofar as people behave as if they mean things. The POTUS can ignore the Constitution, and his underlings can ignore the POTUS's EOs, and in either case, they'll face consequences only to the extent that people who have the power to inflict consequences on them choose to exercise this power. Is the contention here that Trump is such a cult of personality that this particular EO wouldn't hold up in court or any Constitutional scrutiny, but Trump's underlings will just follow it anyway? If so, it seems that the danger is in Trump being such a cult of personality, rather than any particular EO he might write.
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
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’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
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
1yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr ago
IANAL, but what laws would you expect to be in the books that that would violate?
07mk
2yr ago
I don't see it. I'm not sure how the facts stated in the OP could have been expressed in a more dry and less outraged manner without outright sounding like (the old-school scifi stereotype of) an AI.
07mk
2yr 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
8mo ago
Wouldn't the obvious stance be "we aren't the progressives of the past?" Residential schools have plenty of evidence towards their existence in Canada, and were certainly pushed by what would've been a progressive mindset back in the day.
The issue is that "we aren't the progressives of the past" is the stance of the progressives of today. So saying that doesn't escape one from repeating the mistakes of the past; it's how you repeat the mistakes of the past.
07mk
2yr 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
2d ago
If she's the type of person who would quit over her company's LLM generating text like that, then it's certainly a good thing that she did quit.
07mk
3mo ago
If the dog was playing chess using some method that was not like how humans play chess, and which couldn't generalize to being able to play well, the joke wouldn't be very funny.
Humor is subjective and all that, but I don't understand this perspective. I'd find the joke exactly as funny no matter what way the dog was playing chess, whether it was thinking through its moves like a human theoretically is, or, I dunno, moving pieces by following scents that happened to cause its nose to push pieces in ways that followed the rules and was good enough to defeat a human player at some rate greater than chance. The humor in the joke to me comes from the player downplaying this completely absurd super-canine ability the dog has, and that ability remains the same no matter how the dog was accomplishing this, and no matter if it wouldn't imply any sort of general ability for the dog to become better at chess. Simply moving the pieces in a way that follows the rules most of the time would already be mindblowingly impressive for a dog, to the extent that the joke would still be funny.
07mk
4mo ago
We don't know the "ground truth" either, though. All the information that we parse, such as touching the Earth or seeing the moon in the sky or through a telescope are basically hallucinations created by our brains based on the sensory input that we take in through detection mechanisms in our cells. We have to trust that the qualia that we experience are somewhat accurate representations of the "ground truth." Our experience is such that we perceive reality accurately enough such that we can keep surviving both as individuals and as a species, but who knows just how accurate that really is?
LLMs are certainly far more limited compared to us in the variety of sensory input they can take in, or how often it can update itself permanently based on that sensory input, and the difference in quantity is probably large enough to have a quality of its own.
07mk
7mo ago
This comment suffers from implying that a woman having a bodily feature that women are known to have can't also make the woman look mannish.
07mk
1yr 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
1yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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.
This isn't really a good characterization of DEI policies. You'd have to replace "background" with something like "superficial" or "demographic." But, in any case, the argument still works when considering "background," as below.
These are what I'd consider strawman/weakman versions of DEI, not the actual defensible portion of DEI. Even DEI proponents don't tend to say that the mere shade of someone's skin is, in itself, something that makes their contribution to the organization better. The argument is that the shade of their skin has affected their life experiences (perhaps you could call this their background - but, again, DEI isn't based on those life experiences, it's based on the superficial characteristics) in such a way as to inevitably influence the way they think, and the addition of diversity in the way people think is how they contribute better to the organization. This argument has significant leaps of faith that make it fall apart on close inspection, but it's still quite different from saying something like that someone's skin color has direct influence to diversity of thought, which would be a leap very few people would be willing to make.
Whereas with targeting ideological diversity, someone who has a different ideology, by definition, adds a different perspective. That is a direct targeting of the actual thing that people are considering as being helpful to the organization, i.e. diversity of thought.
So again, no, the very concept of "DEI for conservatives," at least in the context of diversity of thought, is just incoherent. If people were calling for putting conservative quotas in the NBA or something, that might work as a comparison.
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