07mk
6mo ago
It can be when you're accustomed to not paying, and you see plenty of others not paying. If free riding is an option, why not take it? In this case, it's partly the extra convenience and the little warm and fuzzy feeling I get from doing things above board, but, again, that seems just like rationalizations that I'm telling myself so I don't feel too much like a sucker.
07mk
1yr ago
For all intents and purposes if we could simulate a human brain down to the chemical reactions and electrons and voltage potentials doing their thing it would be a human WITH qualia.
How do you know this? I don't think we can conclude this without actually doing it and checking. And I don't think we have the technology to do this yet or even to check it.
07mk
1yr ago
This is true regardless of the immaterial soul thing, no?
No. For instance, in your example, being logical, detail oriented, artsy, or creative (the latter 2 and former 2 don't seem to be at all in conflict with each other, for the record, making the analogy rather off) aren't things that exist independently of the body. These personality traits come about as a consequence of the biology of the brain which is affected pretty directly by the biology of the rest of the body, such as hormones. The reason I might be any of these things isn't because there's something fundamentally "me" about being logical and detail oriented or whatever, it's because my physical body caused that to arise in my sets of behavior and my consciousness.
A pill that changes my personality in that way would be a pill that changes my personality in that way. It would be changing my biology the way pills tend to do, and I do consider it quite a stretch to say that that's partial murder.
07mk
1yr ago
It's hard to imagine this drama as anything other than dead and buried. Chick-fil-A hasn't funded these groups for a decade now, sticking to safer investments in summer camps and youth leadership.
I had thought that the drama was dead and zombified rather than buried, but perhaps it really is buried by now, from seeing this news about Chick-fil-A opening in Boston last year, 9 years after Boston's mayor had publicly announced that Chick-fil-A would be kept out of Boston specifically for their perceived anti-gay politics.
07mk
1mo ago
Like, James Damore was unsuccessful, but he did sincerely try to counter wokeness at Google where he worked.
I don't think this is an accurate description of what he did when he wrote and distributed his infamous memo. I'd characterize it more as him sincerely trying to help wokeness, under the belief that the woke (or rather, the equivalents at the time, since I don't think "woke" was nearly as commonly used back then) genuinely wanted to accomplish the things they said they did.
07mk
2mo ago
There are no sympathetic articles, no wikipedia articles about the phenomenon. Why is it that some women are more equal than others?
I've noticed that the people who tend to emphasize how bad online abuse towards women is tend to carve out an exception for Rowling because she's someone who managed to convince lots of people to voluntarily hand over billions of pounds to her and as a result has substantial resources at her disposal. In a very real way, this is an honest and straightforward way of analyzing the situation based on the privilege framework that such people tend to subscribe to. The fact that such a thing is an exception rather than the rule would have been an interesting observation at some point in the past, but that seems banal now.
07mk
5mo ago
Probably the most prominent example of this recently has been the phrase "from the river to the sea." Some people surely use it with a genocidal intent (there should be no Jews between the "river and the sea") while other use it as an expression of solidarity between the West Bank, Gaza, and non-Jews in Israel more generally.
I must admit I'm pretty ignorant about this phrase and why it's considered genocidal. Getting rid of Israel as a nation and even kicking out all of the Jews from there isn't genocidal, just ethnic cleansing, right? Is the issue that that was the Nazis' initial plan before they got to the Final one, and as such we can round one up to the other? That seems like the slippery slope fallacy (though I'll admit that there is indication that the people descending down the slope are doing so by pouring oil on it rather than by carefully inching down by building steps or something).
But I'd also say that, if it's the case that the phrase is genocidal in nature, then it doesn't really matter if the person saying the slogan is thinking to themselves, "I'm saying this because I really want those Jews murdered" or "I'm saying this because I want to show solidarity between XYZ and literally not an inch more;" the latter is still showing full-throated support for genocide, and their ignorance of what the phrase that they chant means just adds on to their ethical failure, and certainly doesn't mitigate it. I'm just not sure how the phrase could be genocidal in nature.
07mk
7mo ago
This breach will probably be plugged, since the exploiters are not organized. But I'm not sure how they'll do it since the only way they can do it without folding to essentialism (which they can no longer) is to require political tests which can always be faked.
Why is that the only way they can do it? Isn't the classic obscenity test - "I know it when I see it" - good enough? Arguably, the current regime is just that with more steps designed to obfuscate it. This ties into my thoughts on your first statement:
I've watched intersectionals take Liberalism apart limb from limb using its own reasoning against it. I think turnabout is fair play.
which is cromulent enough on its face, but which doesn't account for the defenses that the "intersectionals" (first time I've encountered this term used as a noun to refer to the people - I like it) have built against this very sort of thing. After all, if you master how to exploit a vulnerability, you also often learn how to fix them. In this case, it's just rejecting the concept of "using reasoning or logic to draw conclusions" as an oppressive made-up structure, in favor of "listening to marginalized voices." Which, given the degrees of freedom in determining what a "marginalized voice" is, in the context of some conference discriminating its attendants, is just another version of "I know it when I see it."
07mk
1yr ago
For example, science takes as constraints certain assumptions on observability, repeatability, testability, etc. There are different ways of formulating these assumptions, but they are constraints on what types of things the method can speak to.
Metaphysics, uh, kind of is? The core error is that we can just do away with any metaphysical questions, we can just boldly declare that the only one true possible metaphysical theory, must just be exactly the things that are within the constraints of this one particular tool.
Thank you, there's a lot more meat on this bone now. I think this "core error" - "that we can just do away with any metaphysical questions, we can just boldly declare that the only one true possible metaphysical theory" can't be ascribed to atheists (or theists) to a meaningful extent, though. I don't see atheists saying we can do away with such questions and that there's only one true possible metaphysical theory.
Read the specific comment I linked to. I know it's long, but it very completely describes the problem long before it even uses the word "shoe".
I did read that specific comment, and it was that specific comment to which I was referring. It's highly muddled and goes all over the place, and, again, it doesn't answer the actual question I had, which was about what this whole deal about "implying shoes are atheists" is all about. My best guess is that it has to do with some sort of claim that people are declaring that shoes are atheists, but this seems like a largely random statement that has little relation to what actual atheists say. I mean, I'd guess that somewhere someone ran into an atheist who said that, but that's not very interesting when we're talking about atheism or atheists in general.
From what I've gathered, I think the answer to your original question is that people here generally try not to engage with weakmen (try being the operative word), and the stuff you're describing are so much weakmen as to border on strawman territory.
07mk
1yr ago
A prison is a place where privacy is suspended and the rule of law can and should be total. The rate of prison rape should be zero.
The level of totalitarian control that would be required for that might mean having to increase the population of prison security guards by multiple orders of magnitude, to the extent that maybe you'd have to have a single guard for each and every prisoner. Engineering that kind of situation seems like a non-trivial economic/political problem. Perhaps with development of AI and robotics, we could use non-human prison guards to make up the numbers, but that's a non-trivial technological problem.
07mk
1yr ago
I suppose, can you give me an example of a thing that a person can choose? I think, at bottom, the above argument is a facile face on what is really just hard determinism at its core (from people who can't bear to "choose" to live with the consequences of real hard determinism).
I can't give an example, and that's the entire point; there is no such example, by my lights. And I don't see how determinism enters into it. Whether the universe is deterministic or there's some sort of cosmic dice that get rolled for physical interactions that make future states impossible to reliably predict based on the current state, one still doesn't have choice on the states of one's brain, which are the direct antecedents of one's apparent "choices." I didn't choose to have a brain that tells my finger muscles to type out this paragraph, for instance, and that's the case even if the atoms in my brain aren't following some sort of deterministic set of physical rules but rather being affected by some sort of truly random process.
It's more a question of dualism than determinism, which are related concepts but not identical. Dualism makes room for a soul to manipulate our neurons, allowing us to make true choices, but also requires a belief in the supernatural. Without it, we have to accept that whatever experience of "choosing" one has in their consciousness is a consequence of the behavior of the atoms in one's brain, which may be deterministic or not, but either way aren't controlled by oneself. One could argue that one's current brain state is "controlled" by past choices made by one's conscious mind, but that just moves the whole thing back a step, which can continue all the way back to the point where one became conscious for the first time as a baby.
07mk
1yr ago
This is the same way that an art student "copies" the art of other artists by the light reflecting off the picture s activating their rods and cones which get converted to signals in the neurons in their brains which produce the perception of the image in their consciousness. By your definition of copying, all perception of media is copying; e.g. every time I listen to Bohemian Rhapsody, I'm copying the work of Queen. Which is a fine definition, but is also not exactly a common one and one that loses a lot of the meaning that's intended when people use that word.
07mk
1yr ago
I’m going to compare this, for no reason at all, to Squid Game. Attractive, interesting actors with strong expressions who we emotionally relate to.
Did Squid Game really have that many attractive actors? I thought the one North Korean defector was very attractive (IIRC the actor is a model), but I found the others pretty average, possibly even below average by major-production-actor standards. There's the undercover cop too, I suppose, though he's barely a major character.
07mk
1yr ago
I'm a non-native English speaker as well, though I might as well be due to immigrating at a very early age, and I second this and will go even stronger: it doesn't matter if there are impressionable children around, because they don't need to be protected from encountering the pain of seeing a specific set of characters in a specific order. Letters placed or syllables pronounced in some specific order are not magical spells, and it is bad for adults to behave as if they were in front of impressionable children.
07mk
1yr ago
I don't think the forum is anti-trans in principle; it's just that almost all trans are diametrically opposed to more core values that this forum holds.
I don't think this is quite right, actually. People in this forum being "anti-trans" is really only true to the extent that they are against the demands of self-proclaimed pro-trans activists. In terms of the literal meanings of the terms "anti" and "trans," this forum is pretty full of people who aren't anti-trans. Rather, it has to do with opinions specifically about the demands of self-proclaimed pro-trans activists. Obviously this is an easy equivocation to make by accident just because of the literal words involved; my belief is that this type of equivocation is encouraged - and likely even believed in - by the self-proclaimed pro-trans activists; more people believing in the unsupported notion that these activists are speaking on behalf of the actual trans population lends them greater credibility.
07mk
1mo ago
On the flip side, I think this post was written tactfully, but it still ended up in the negatives - in fact I was surprised to see how many downvotes it had given how anodyne it was.
I don't think that post was particularly tactful. Starting right off the bat by claiming the person is being weird isn't very tactful, just the opposite. There's a good point to be made about singling out Democrats being unfair given the behavior of the other party, but that's not a tactful way to make it. This is the kind of behavior I tend to see out of people who complain about being downvoted for not fitting into the "echochamber" of this place, that, at best, they're passive aggressive in an obvious way that's harmful to the quality of the discourse, instead of taking the effort to contribute their views in a non-combative way to produce good discussion.
07mk
2mo ago
4chan is one of the closest things we've gotten to that in the open web, and back when I used to use 4chan with any regularity over a decade ago, I recall thinking that it was not only usable, it was far more usable than any other "social media"-type websites, along with having an overall better social ecosystem (the enforced anonymity might have been the key to that one, though). Seeing how social media websites have evolved in the time since, I get the sense that the comparative advantage of 4chan has only gotten greater (though it seems 4chan itself may have changed in that time to become worse, so who knows).
07mk
2mo ago
I wouldn’t say stupid. It’s that most of them have majored in film and writing and have been working on only that kind of thing and most likely have never met working scientists, business owners, or anyone who isn’t involved in writing and filmmaking.
That kind of insular world creates all kinds of stupid blind spots. They don’t understand science or know anyone who does, so they understand science only on a popular science IFLS level where it’s either terrible and destructive, or it basically shits out gadgets and stands in for magic.
Of course they do the same with politics, history, journalism, and education too.
I think one of the biggest things holding back screenwriting is that insular perspective
From the purely academic g or IQ or whatever perspective, these people probably don't fall into the category of what people think of when they think of "stupid people." The mere ability to put together a script with a coherent plot and structure that fits a TV show (e.g. each episode presents some self-contained plot point that serves as a piece of the larger season-long plot) probably excludes them from that.
But as the mother of a fictional stupid person always said, stupid is as stupid does. And the behavior you describe is extremely stupid. If you're writing a mostly grounded script that involves some scientific mechanism as a core plot point and will be presented to a broad adult audience, then obviously getting that mechanism to be plausible to a layman adult should be a high priority. Which means checking the science and the typical layman's understanding of the science, so as to make sure that they're not falling prey to blind spots created by their insular perspective. After all, it's common knowledge that everyone has blind spots and that no one has a true grasp of their own blind spots; as such, if getting this plot point to sound believable to a typical viewer matters to the writers, then they would check.
They either didn't check or didn't care to implement what they learned when they checked. This indicates that they either actively chose to write the script in a way that made themselves appear stupid or just didn't care about it.
07mk
5mo ago
Fair enough in terms of happiness. I think that just shows that, for many people, including some subset of women, happiness just isn't all that important a thing to aim for in a relationship, and they would prefer to be in a relationship that causes them less happiness and more misery than one that causes greater happiness and less misery, since there are other factors in the less happy and more miserable relationship that make it overall more desirable. I'd agree that if SkookumTree thinks that women would be happier being in a relationship with an active wife-beater than with him with all his awkward shortness, then he is wrong, and not by a little, but by a lot. But I think there's a large chunk of truth to be seen here, which is that many women would prefer being in that unhappier and more miserable relationship than with him, as shown by revealed preference (I also think he vastly underestimates both the quantity and quality of women who would prefer the opposite).
07mk
6mo ago
Bad idea. This makes the child very miserable while they are alive and causes suffering, which is something we don't want (otherwise why care about human welfare at all for anyone, we're all going to die at one point?). There won't be any lasting trauma experienced but there will be suffering at the time of the rape experienced by the child and this is bad.
Hm, what about matching the child with a pedophile? Perhaps that's just equivalent to the original prostitute case. But I'm thinking, if we could match the child with someone who would willingly do this for free and even get a positive experience out of it for it in itself, rather than someone who have to be bribed with money, this would be even better. Especially since they would be experiencing something which is normally outside their reach; it's like granting 2 make-a-wish-type wishes in one. Assuming we go through all the same approval/consent steps with the child as we would with a prostitute.
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
This requires admitting that immigrants are "undesirables"
No, it requires admitting that TX regards them as such.
The whole issue here seems to be that states other than TX, such as CA, finds it undesirable that TX give these people bus tickets that have places like CA as the destination. I'm not sure how it's possible to frame this in a way that doesn't fully admit that the decisionmakers in places like CA that are complaining or at least pushing back at this action by the decisionmakers by TX are seeing these immigrants as "undesirables."
07mk
1yr ago
It might be right 99% of the time, or even 99.99%, but like self driving cars this is exactly the kind of case where being good but not quite as good as a human is really dangerous.
Is getting things right 99.99%, or even 99% of the time not quite as good as a human doctor, rather than much better than a human doctor? I honestly don't know, and I'm not even sure how to quantify something like this to make like-for-like measurements. But surely at some % rate of success, the LLM would be getting things right at a rate better than could be expected of a typical (or even nth percentile) human doctor.
Which is scary in its own way. An LLM's "thought process" is currently completely unknowable, unlike that of a human doctor. So the types of mistakes it makes are likely to be more mysterious. Yet if it makes fewer mistakes and/or those mistakes are, on net, less harmful/unhealthy, then would it be our moral obligation to use those LLMs over doctors?
07mk
1yr ago
I don't see how this analogy works. The 1st part seems right to me; calling a black person "nigger" in a derogatory way necessarily implies something negative about all black people, due to the history and connotations of that word. But misgendering a trans person doesn't denigrate all trans people; it just says that you don't consider that specific trans person as belonging to the gender they're claiming to. This doesn't denigrate them for being trans; at worst, it says that respecting their identified gender is conditional on that person not being a criminal. Which means not submitting to the "self-ID is definitionally correct" standard, but that's not denigrating the criminal for being trans.
Lots of people share this sentiment, but I'll admit I personally never understood this. Maybe I've been lucky enough to encounter just good off-brand cola, but I've overwhelmingly found that off-brand is more than good enough compared to Coca Cola or Pepsi. I'm also one of the weird people who significantly prefers Pepsi to Coca Cola (and Diet Pepsi to Diet Coke) and also likes to flatten my colas first by shaking the bottle and letting it dissipate, so maybe I just have weird tastes in soft drinks.
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