07mk
4mo ago
They aren't monsters. They're just regular people who actually believe what they're told, and who take seriously what they have been taught is the most important matter in the world.
This sort of thought crosses my mind whenever I see someone call people celebrating Kirk's murder as "mentally unwell" or "insane." Sadly, I think those people are the historical norm, and not because of coincidence, but because of basic human psychology. Society seems to have become better to live in as we built structures and methods to temper this perfectly natural predilection to cheer on the suffering of people we dislike, but the progressive left seems to disagree, and the rest of the left seems too cowed to prevent them from having their way.
It's been fascinating to see this happening in and due to academia, which was ostensibly meant to generate truth in part by enabling and encouraging the sharing of different ideas and perspectives. Even in the mid-2000s when I was attending an ultra progressive liberal arts college, I would have bet that a sizable majority of students - and a higher proportion of leftist students - would support literal swastika-wearing Nazis giving a talk on campus, with counterprotesters being respectful enough to allow the audience to actually listen to the talk they came to hear. This sort of commitment to enlightenment values and open exchange of ideas was one of the ways we smugly considered ourselves superior to the uneducated masses, in fact.
That academia not only became a breeding ground, but a source, for such a blatantly anti-intellectual ideology has made me think that, perhaps groupthink, status seeking, and social shaming are the most powerful forces known to man. Certainly more powerful than truth seeking.
07mk
4mo ago
So Kirk needed to callously advocate for other people to pay the cost for his beliefs and it was bad that that happened but it must happen?
Is there any other way to advocate for that? Considering that literally every piece of campaigning or lobbying is advocating for other people to pay the cost for one's beliefs, we all have to advocate for that. Advocating it without acknowledging that innocent people will be subject to violence by my preferred policy prescriptions, no matter what they are, is far more callous; and not even understanding that innocent people will be subject to violence is that much even moreso. Compared to those, just plainly stating that there will be extra innocent deaths, and that it's worth the cost, is one of the least callous ways to advocate for basically any policy.
07mk
4mo ago
For example if I give speech that: "Gay-ness is an abomination before the eyes of God and we should not allow it in our government or our society" Am I inflicting violence? By your definition I am not, nothing I say is legally able to be restricted as I am not directly threatening anyone. However, say I do get this law to pass, now some faceless bureaucrat is going to punish any gay person they find because they are illegal, and they are going to do so with the full might on the state. Its back to stoning, conversion torture, or throwing the gays off roof tops. By my definition I have advocated for those policies, I have advocated for violence. So I think your definition is naive in the extreme.
I'm honestly pretty confused by this paragraph. By my definition in this example, you have advocated for violence. Advocating for violence is not the same as committing violence. Furthermore, if you want to say that advocating for violence in the sense of pushing for the state's monopoly on violence to be wielded in some direction is violence, it seems to me that, again, you're saying that, in the realm of politics, all words are swords. Again, fair enough if that's your worldview (but, again, then that raises the question of why you decided to point to this specific incident as if his status as a sword-user differentiated him from any other person who has ever stated a political opinion with the intent to change government policy, i.e. campaigned). I think some nuance between words and violence is valuable for keeping modern Western civilization as prosperous and easy to survive in, but there's plenty of room for me to be wrong.
So, again, there's a difference between convincing someone to enact violence and enacting violence oneself. Depending on the case, e.g. ordering a hitman to murder someone, the former can be just as bad as the latter. That doesn't make them equivalent or the same. I do believe that there's a significant difference in the "violence" committed by someone lobbying AOC or even AOC herself and the "violence" committed by Mangione such that, if we decide to redefine "violence" to include things like the former, then we'd have to create subcategories of "violence" such that we're comparing like for like. Because the word "violence" is just a label, after all, and the point of separating it out from argumentation is that there's something meaningfully different between enacting violence itself and saying something, even if that saying is advocating for actions that play out in violence (i.e. literally every law ever).
07mk
4mo ago
because a if a society degenerates and fails because it can't handle that type of freedom, then it morally deserved to fail all along, and should crash and burn accordingly.
I would imagine that's how the smarter ideologically committed proponents of freedom of movement feel about importing infinity migrants.
I just want to say, I don't know if my peers and I were particularly smarter than other ideologically committed proponents of open borders back when I was one of those, but that was explicitly and openly one of the arguments we made. If allowing any humans into the USA without limits were to destroy the USA, then let it be destroyed, at least we didn't discriminate against foreigners along the way.
07mk
4mo ago
I think these are 2 different phenomena. One is preference on where and how to apply violence, i.e. 100% at people I dislike, -100% at people I like. The other has to do with the life that violence takes on when you start it. That when you escalate to the next level of violence, it has a tendency to spiral to the next level and then to the next level and so on, since people rarely like to take violence sitting down, and it's not that common that you have such overwhelming force that not even your victim's friends couldn't come after you in the long run. There seems to be an overestimated belief in the ability of combatants to titrate and control violence, and it's a common leftist misconception IME that it's plausible for a cop to shoot-to-injure a suspect in a firefight. Heck, I've even encountered a real human adult who actually complained about some armed suspect being shot to death by cops instead of having his gun shot out of his hand. And it's not uncommon that I see leftists complaining about some suspect being riddled with dozens of bullets when one or two should've sufficed.
It might be mostly an artifact of differences in experience with guns or physical combat.
07mk
4mo ago
Campaigning to use the state's monopoly on violence to enforce your beliefs is violence by another name. Just because you can abstract it away doesn't be you are absolved.
Yeah, no. You're the one who's trying to abstract violence into it. Campaigning isn't violence. It's convincing. If you convince someone to commit violence, that person chose to commit violence, based on your speech. Depending on the nature of the convincing, that speech certainly could be legally restricted and censured. That doesn't make it not speech. You're free to play games about cause-and-effect and such, but those games don't actually change what things are.
In any case, the point of using the word "violence" is semantic, anyway. Let's say that using words to campaign for some political position is violence. In that case, literally everyone who has ever stated a political statement with approval has committed violence, and they're living by the sword, and so they could die by the sword. Which is a fair enough view to have, but it also cuts out any possibility of people actually having discourse about policy.
Like, if your claim is that there are no words, only swords, then that's perfectly cromulent, but also very different from what's implied by pointing at a specific person and their specific circumstances and saying "live by the sword, die by the sword."
Kirk clearly had a position that the 2nd amendment is worth a certain amount of blood. Is he willing to pay that cost? Or does he want other people to pay it for him? One is the principled position, the other is a cur not worthy of anything.
This is a vapid statement, though. Because literally everyone with any ideological or political view has a position that some things are worth a certain amount of blood. We can speculate all we like about what Kirk himself would have thought, in terms of his own death being worth the cost, but the one thing we know is that no one will ever know or even have much confidence in a guess (at least on this Earth), and so speculating about it is just... vapid. And it's something that could be equally speculated about with anyone.
07mk
4mo ago
I'll just say, I have no argument to make against your belief. But from my experience as a blue living in one of the bluest areas of the country where that modal Democrat voter you described is likely a majority (certainly D voters are a supermajority, but whether that specific modal D voter is a majority is questionable) and if not that, a plurality, I don't think many of them would murder Musk if given a chance like that. Most of them go along with the most extreme of the progressive demands, and most of them do have lots of antipathy towards Musk, but straight-up cold-blooded murder is still beyond the pale for most, by my perception. That's probably changing, with the left's reaction to Mangione pushing things somewhat and perhaps its reaction to Kirk's murder pushing things even more.
Now, if you selected for young, college-educated people among those D voters, especially women, among the modal D voters, then yeah, I'd probably take the under on a millisecond.
07mk
4mo ago
I don't condone the celebration of it but is it really so far fetched to accept this as a "Sword of Damocles" situation? Kirk advocated and is directly on record for saying: "the few deaths is worth it for our second amendment rights". Live by the sword and die by the sword.
Saying "the few deaths is worth it for our second amendment rights" is specifically living by the word and specifically not living by the sword. Living by the sword would be "watch me as I assassinate this politician who's pro gun-control." No argument that Kirk could ever state around gun control could ever rise to him "living by the sword." Words don't become violence just because they are about violence or condoning violence. Nor do they become equivalent to physical violence.
07mk
4mo ago
It's been roughly a full day since the assassination, not nearly enough time to get a meaningful sense of the long- or even medium-term effects, if any, on national politics and political discourse, but still enough time to get a first blush. I haven't been looking around too much, but certainly I've humored my morbid curiosity about how things are going (that morbid curiosity doesn't extend to morbidity itself; I have negative interest in actually seeing the video of the murder, and I've managed to avoid it so far).
The main thing I've noticed is just how depressingly predictable it is. From the right, I see the expected mix of "they showed their TRUE faces, time for knives out" and "now is the time to pull back and de-escalate, or else our society will not survive" in roughly equal parts. But what I see overwhelmingly more than either is a fervent push of cancel culture, in exactly the same way as the left were doing and being complained about for the past decade+. Lots of minor and even a few right-wing influencers digging through BlueSky and Tumblr accounts, looking for minor nobodies who said egregious and extreme things in celebration of this murder, and fishing for doxxing info to try to get them fired. It's just more of "I believe in free speech when it's useful for me, but not when it's costly to me or my desire to see people I dislike punished" that we saw the left go through in the past 2 decades. And, again, depressingly predictable.
From the left, it's been all the standard interference that any ideological cluster throws out whenever some member of that cluster does something that almost everyone disapproves of, of the sort of "let's wait to find out - it could be just a random loon," "yawn, it's just another gun murder in a nation full of them," or "this [negative adjectives chosen for maximum affect while barely avoiding crossing the line into libel] right-wing influencer was shot." Along with a generous helping of "he had bad opinions, therefore I don't mind" or "I have exactly as much sympathy for him and his family as he did for [people I've deemed to be oppressed]."
Entirely predictable if your basic assumption is that no one is principled, everyone is always looking for plausibly deniable ways to harm people they disagree with and gloat about it. So depressingly predictable. If you had asked me to speculate how people would react to Kirk's murder 2 days ago, those 2 things would probably have been included in some form, certainly the latter one.
And because it's so predictable, it also makes it somewhat confusing. This reminded me of a couple of topics that I'm sure very many on The Motte are familiar with: signalling and common knowledge. Common knowledge has to do with knowledge shared between multiple people, where not only do they have the same knowledge, they also know that each other has that same knowledge, and they also know that each other knows that each other has that same knowledge, etc. With the polarization and recent history of the US, it's common knowledge at this point that, if someone on one side gets physically harmed in what appears to be an attack from the other side, or if someone who seems to be on one side commits some random act of violence, then the blind partisans on the attacker's side will run interference for them, and people against that side will try to pin it on them and use it to excuse their worst, most selfish and cynical behaviors, such as e.g. adopting cancel culture.
As such, if someone wants to signal that they're not just a blind partisan who can be safely ignored, they need to present something that sets them apart from those. Otherwise, what they're doing is either admitting that they're happy to play the role of a blind partisan or that they are the blind partisan that the role was based off of. But then that's a signal for anyone who isn't already bought in or almost bought in to just ignore them or even use them as ammo for arguing why that person's side needs to be crushed even harder.
Which is all well and good if your priority is to make in-group members clap like seals rather than to convince people that this is a nothingburger/perfect justification for crushing the outgroup. But priorities like that aren't all well and good, at least for the health of USA society.
My own bias makes me really really wish that people on the left would actually attempt to live up to our promise of being better than the right and find ways to de-escalate. In this situation, that would have to involve signalling a commitment against political violence in the face of speech of the sort Kirk practiced, and that signal must be costly for it to actually be a signal. And, unfortunately, the kinds of generic statements of condolences and condemnation that mainstream politicians throw out really don't signal anything of the sort; rather, it's a signal that they're happy enough to pay lipservice against political violence when people they dislike get got. It could take many forms, such as committing to push forward some policies that Kirk liked even if they dislike it, because they believe in setting the precedent that if you murder someone for political reasons, your political allies will do everything they can to make sure that the murdered person's political wishes get fulfilled. Or even something relatively minor like that thing Elon said he'd do, funding murals of that Ukrainian woman who got murdered in NC - set the precedent that if you murder someone for political reasons, then your political allies will do their best to make that person a martyr and someone to be celebrated and revered. Or it could be even more minor, just calling out the ideology that refuses a label that explicitly elides between physical violence and words that people dislike in a way that explicitly justifies physical violence against political commentators like Kirk as long as their views are sufficiently disliked and committing to cross aisles to shut that down, or at least shut down the pro-violence-against-speech part.
I'm sure there are some very minor influencers and politicians out there doing just that, but I worry that they're just dominated, by orders of magnitude, by those of us who just want to keep polarizing the issue.
07mk
4mo ago
I encountered this on X. No idea of its veracity, but maybe that roof looks like one of the buildings from the map? https://x.com/chhardman/status/1965882258902102232?t=QWRPSTTaTYHNGabfh-HW2A&s=09
07mk
4mo ago
There will always be a certain number of people on either side of the aisle who will celebrate violence against the other side, and the only thing that's different now than 15 years ago is that more of them are on the internet by virtue of fewer of them being too old to go on Reddit.
I don't think this is plausible. Since 2010, the stature and influence of an ideology that explicitly rejects argument in favor of shutting up through force has been ascendant. Ideologues of opposing stripes have taken that as permission to do the same thing. The idea that this has had no influence in the proclivity of people who follow the ideology to celebrating the murder of people they disagree with would require a pretty extraordinary ability for populations to be resistant to memes about political violence that I don't think is reflected in any other topic. Especially since political violence against people someone dislikes is one of the most enticing things in the world, and it's uncommon in time that qualms about using it were nearly as common as it is now.
I'll say, I don't think it's a coincidence that I grew up in a blue area in the 90s and 00s and ended up believing that political violence in response to arguments, no matter how evil the arguments, is unacceptable, which also happened to be the dogma in those areas at the time. I think the ideologies that are hegemonic in your environment do tend to have influence on you such that population rates of adoption of ideas can change if the hegemonic ideology changes.
07mk
4mo ago
There is no longer a win condition for the American left as it exists in this moment.
Oof, that's hard to read. One of those things that, despite being true, doesn't emit laughter in me. If the left manages political victory or maintains cultural victory only on the back of assassination of people they've deemed sufficiently disagreeable to constitute danger or violence, then whatever made the left better than the alternatives would have been destroyed completely, not even a shadow of a single speck of ash remaining.
07mk
4mo ago
I've never followed the young conservative influencers much, but Kirk always seemed like the moderate, respectable sort -- it's wild that he would be the victim of political violence and not someone like Fuentes.
Kirk is (was) far more dangerous to the people who disagree with him than Fuentes is, though, at least by their stated belief of what "danger" constitutes. Fuentes is basically a nobody extremist, while Kirk is (was) a fairly mainstream right-winger who is good at talking to young people. I noticed this back when Jordan Peterson was rising, and there were plenty of comments about how he's basically a Democrat by nature of being a liberal and somewhat right-wing Canadian, making it confusing why he'd be getting so much hate from the left. But that's exactly what makes him so hate-worthy - his ideas and arguments were so close to the liberal left's that he could actually convince some of the less illiberal leftists to defect! Whereas the actual extremist white supremacists or neo-Nazis had zero shot at convincing anyone who was on the left. So why waste ammo on the latter?
Now, I wonder, is Kirk more dangerous to them as a martyr or alive? I suspect there's little enough reverence for martyrs right now that his death won't compel that many people to join his cause. However, I could see his murder as disgusting a lot of people away from the cause that he fights against and is not shy about openly calling for violence against people for their speech. Time will tell, I suppose.
07mk
4mo ago
There was indeed an implicit hidden term in the "but it doesn't seem odd or irrational…" but it wasn't just "prima facie"; it was "but if you're going to do this stupid thing at all, which you shouldn't, then prima facie…".
OK, but then that changes the meaning of the statement fully. Because doing such an obviously stupid thing is irrational. Which makes your statement mean something like, "If you're committed to being irrational by falling back to Bayesian pattern matching, then it's not irrational to land at this conclusion." Fair enough, 100% true and defensible. Also doesn't contradict or challenge at all the notion that journalists are being irrational in being quicker to label white-on-black killings as racially motivated than to label black-on-white killings as such.
I think our remaining disagreement here is in how useful the currently-available details might be. I do think we're largely in prima facie land.
(I'll grant you that the "I got the white bitch" remark isn't nothing. But neither does it say very much unless you already have priors weighted towards black-on-white killings having a strong likelihood of being racially-motivated. If a crazed killer who's just killed a red-headed woman crows that he "got that ginger bitch", I wouldn't conclude that he killed her because he has 19th-century-peasant levels of prejudice against red-haired people per se.)
Yeah, no. You need zero priors weighted towards that. Entirely unprovoked murder on a random stranger followed by commentary on that stranger's race doesn't need one to have a prior leaning in one way in order to conclude racist motivations.
If person X killed ginger Y, and one of the only specific pieces of information we knew about the motive was X muttering "got that ginger bitch," we would absolutely be justified to conclude tentatively (as is the case for all conclusions we're talking about here) that he was motivated by some sort of bigoted hatred against gingers. It wouldn't be a particularly strong conclusion, one that could and would change as more information came in, but it absolutely would be the correct conclusion based on the available evidence.
07mk
4mo ago
My argument is a Bayesian one. What I said is: there is plenty of long-standing precedent for American whites killing American blacks for specifically racist reasons, but not much for American blacks killing American whites for the same; therefore, when dealing with any individual murder, it is prima facie more likely to be racism-based if it's white-on-black than if it's black-on-white.
To the extent that this Bayesian argument makes sense, it is pretty much useless for any analysis of this incident or incidents similar to this one, because in no actual incident we're talking about, are we dealing with a prima facie situation where literally the only thing we know about the murder is the races involved. Notably, the races involved, by themselves, provide so little information about any given incident in comparison to readily available information about the incident just from observing it that to call it rational to consider this specific almost-as-crude-as-possible Bayesian analysis to be meaningful would be rather absurd.
As such, your judgment below is suspect:
I would rather the press not ascribe racial motives to anybody without ironclad evidence, but it doesn't seem odd or irrational to me that white-on-black killings should be more readily assumed to be racist.
It is irrational to rely on such a crude method of Bayesian analysis to land at a conclusion when there are many far more precise, far more specific pieces of information that offer far more information on motive than looking only at the races. Now, it's possible that there's a silent "prima facie" in that sentence, which is perfectly cromulent and makes it more defensible. However, if such a hidden term were in there, it would also render it entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand, as the discussion is about a situation (and generally, multiple situations) where prima facie doesn't apply due to just mountains of information surrounding the incident and the individuals involved.
People aren't talking about what the Platonic form of a journalist would do in a spherical vacuum, they're talking about how real-world journalists are really behaving when given lots of information that has irreversibly destroyed their ability to be in a prima facie state and, as such, using extremely crude Bayesian reasoning of this sort is irrational.
However, it's not odd, given what we know about the biases and behaviors of most mainstream journalists in most mainstream outlets. I suppose that's one form of Bayesian thinking that's justified in this case.
07mk
4mo ago
I see the logic, but it also still doesn't make sense to me. "Republicans pounce" is a well-trodden meme at this point, and using such phrasing signals partisanship that discredits themselves and whatever article is under the headline. Anyone who's been paying attention to US politics and journalism - which should include literally every American journalist writing about Republicans - should be fully aware of this. As such, if I were a cynical partisan Democrat journalist editing a headline, I would make sure to avoid any phrase that has any similarities with this meme, knowing that any such similarities would make my mission of manipulating people into buying into my framing and narrative less likely to succeed.
Now, some might say that these journalists are in echo chambers that prevent them from recognizing how they discredit themselves. Seems reasonable, but this also doesn't escape the same problem as above: everyone knows that everyone is susceptible to echo chambers that are invisible to them. And, again, US journalists who cover US politics should be more aware of this than the typical person. As such, a US journalist should at the very least be highly suspicious that they live in an echo chamber, which means that they're less capable of analyzing and reporting the news credibly to the populace in general, which means they're less capable of manipulating them. Or informing them properly, if you're an honest, good-faith operator. As such, a selfish, cynical, partisan journalist would (and certainly a non-cynical, non-partisan one would) try to gain perspectives from outside their echo chambers, thus allowing them to understand how damning anything similar to "Republicans pounce" is to their credibility.
And yet we see the line - sometimes verbatim - trotted out regularly. It appears as the mirror image of the "Democrats are the real racists" (DRRR) meme, which the left has already developed antibodies for, and as such, just serves to discredit the speaker for playing into their hand.
I'm reminded of the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog far too often these days.
07mk
4mo ago
That's a different dimension than what's at play here, I think. Just from what I saw on the video, there's no way that that behavior counts as manslaughter, not murder. Manslaughter tends to be about unreasonable recklessness causing an unintended killing, not intent to kill causing an intended killing. The reason journalists don't call this "murder" is probably because, sans an actual conviction, they're opening themselves up to libel accusations. Sure, this video makes things pretty clear cut, but it's still a judgment call of whether this is truly clear-cut enough to declare as murder given that the justice system hasn't is probably something journalists and editors don't want to make. They could call it "alleged murder," which I think would be fine even if the guy hasn't been charged with murder.
We're not journalists publishing in news outlets, though, so we can call it murder all we want, and I'm pretty comfortable calling it first degree murder, based on the evidence I've seen.
07mk
4mo ago
The way models are influenced by the prompts are very model-specific, and so the easiest way to formulate your prompts to be effective would be to start by copying an existing example and going from there. I personally use anime-based models, which are almost all (all?) trained on Danbooru data sets with underscores removed from the Danbooru tags, which means that Danbooru-specific tags (e.g. 1girl, looking at viewer, 3d, cowboy shot) or Danbooru-common artist names or organizations (e.g. takeuchi takashi, cle masahiro, a1 pictures, kyoto animation - you can mix & match and put different weights, so e.g. "(takeuchi takashi:0.3), (kyoto animation:0.6) will produce a style that looks roughly 2x as inspired by Kyoto Animation's house style as it was inspired by the VN illustrator Takeuchi Takashi) give very predictable and reliable outputs, at least by standards of diffusion models. I've heard that this feature of anime-based models is such a strength that some people opt to use them to make the initial generation, followed by using IMG2IMG with different models and/or ControlNet to turn it into a photorealistic-ish or other style image. Dunno how common that is, though. But also, if you want specific poses or framing or whatever, using ControlNet with a separate input image that you manually create or pick out from somewhere is much more effective.
Parameters can be a real crapshoot and luck of the draw IME, or maybe I'm just poorly informed and lazy. Most anime-based models use Clip Skip = 2 (has to do with skipping the final layer of the neural net or something, which is how the very first useful anime-based models were trained), and you also have to choose the sampler, the CFG, and the number of steps.
As a rule of thumb, 20 steps is a good starting point; steps scale run time linearly, and usually above 20 you get returns that diminished to almost nothing (though usually not totally nothing - it can be good to inpaint over parts with 30+ steps sometimes).
CFG has something to do with how much denoising happens at each step, and lower values tend to make images look blobby and ill-formed, while higher values tend to make them look embossed, harsh, with a look that people have described as "deep fried" or "overcooked." I find values from 4-20 tend to be good, but it's also highly model-dependent and also dependent on what you want to get.
I don't think the sampler matters much, but this, too, is model-dependent. Samplers with "A" at the end of the name are "ancestral," which means they add noise with each step, such that the pictures will never converge on a single image no matter how many steps you take. There are also some samplers that require half as many steps as the others (but each step takes 2x as long), but I forget their naming scheme.
07mk
4mo ago
For image generation, I recommend starting with KritaAI, an open source add-on to the open-source image editing software Krita, available on Github. It adds a panel to Krita where you can enter prompts, and a further settings menu where you can create saved settings for generation inputs. It has automated ways to download default models to use, and it installs an instance of ComfyUI that is used on the back-end for generations. Adding on new models manually is easy and intuitive, just copy-pasting to the proper folders and then selecting them in Krita's settings after a refresh. Krita's interface also makes inpainting extremely easy and intuitive.
For a more powerful/capable but less intuitive tool that takes longer to set up, you can install ComfyUI directly. I never got too much into it, since I enjoy working on and polishing up individual images, which Krita is set up very well for, but the subreddit for ComfyUI had good resources. It's much better than Krita if you want to generate a large batch of images, a batch of images with random variables or systematic changes in the prompts, a batch of images that each have to follow some sequence of steps requiring multiple generations, or any combination of these.
07mk
4mo ago
Blood type is horoscopes for Korean (and Japanese) people. And so is Chinese horoscopes. I see MBTI as horoscopes for educated fans of science who look down on horoscopes as superstition but who haven't done enough research into science to learn about the veracity of MBTI as well as the existence of OCEAN/CANOE. Then again, that's probably more reflective of the population of people I encounter rather than population of people who buy into MBTI.
07mk
4mo ago
In my couple decades of going to the gym regularly, I've yet to see any evidence of this happening. I'm sure it does, because the idea that people who go to the gym are uniquely virtuous and kind doesn't seem likely to be true. But my perception of the culture around people who tend to go to the gym is that they are overwhelmingly positive and supportive, especially to people who look unfit and appear to be inexperienced/incompetent in their exercises. That's been my experience as someone on both sides of that relationship at different points in my life. It's impossible to know for sure, but if someone put a gun to my head, I'd easily guess that less than 50% of people at any given gym would laugh at a typical out-of-shape fat slob who clearly hasn't been to the gym in years but who's genuinely trying his best. Well, except January maybe, when gym rats do get annoyed by the extra crowding that often happens due to new year's resolutions. But that's usually condescension for being less disciplined, rather than mocking for lacking skills/strength.
07mk
4mo ago
If they don't, then how am I able to identify colors of entirely new things sans context?
I don't think that's a thing you're able to do sans context. Infants, lacking context, aren't able to identify the colors of anything.
I suspect we're using the word "context" differently - what exactly do you mean by "sans context"? Are your memories a part of the context? Are the innate saccade patterns that all humans use to look at things (e.g. gaze snaps to contrast, edges) part of the context? How about the learned saccade patterns (e.g. scanning in reading order)?
We probably are. Memories wouldn't be a part of the context, but it would be a tool that allows you to interpret the context (what does context even mean if you lack memories by which to understand it, anyway?). When I say "sans context," I mean that there's no context around the object that would allow you to identify its color even if you couldn't see its color. I.e. if it's so dark that my vision has become black & white - even then, I could guess that a stop sign is red, based on where it is, its shape, the words on it, etc. My contention is that, if I were interrupted during my walk by God bringing into existence some piece of paper on the ground in front of me that was painted a solid color of some color I'd never observed painted on a piece of paper before, I would still be able to identify that color, and the qualia that I experience from viewing that object will be reflective of the photons that bounced off of the paper and onto my retina, such that if similar-wavelength photons bounced off different things and landed on my retina, I would experience similar qualia.
You don't experience unmediated sensory inputs. The map is not the territory, and you can only experience the map, never the territory directly.
...
True, but since we don't directly experience the raw sensory inputs, I don't know how much it matters how similar the raw sensory inputs are. We could quantify the similarity of those raw sensory inputs (e.g. by doing the same dimensionality reduction trick on optic nerve spike frequencies), but I don't think doing so would buy us anything beyond pretty pictures to look at and maybe some cures for diseases.
OK, fair enough. You seem to be saying that the qualia you experience only comes up after your sensory inputs have been mediated by your memories, concepts, etc., and all the stuff that exists before that is inaccessible to your conscious mind and hence not really qualia. Seems likely to be correct.
But this doesn't address the question of how similar that qualia between different people actually are. The experiments you designed seem to be very capable of telling if the relationship between qualia that people have are similar to each other (which seems obviously true - people consistently place "orange" between "red" and "yellow" or "purple" between "blue" and "red," for instance). But having similar (or "very similar" or whatever) qualia doesn't refer to similarities in how one individual's various qualia relate to each other, it refers to similarities in the qualia themselves of observing the same thing between multiple different people. Which, as of yet, can't be measured directly. And one might say that the fact that relationships are pretty consistent between humans should push us towards believing that the qualia themselves are consistent, but we also know that, mathematically, it's pretty easy to have different coloring systems that are homeomorphic to each other.
If you can figure out the full chain of causality from sensation to perception to meaning making to conversion to language to speech, I don't think there's anything left to explain.
That's a heck of a big "if," though, to figure out a chain of causality like that. If we could figure out in full just the link between sensation to perception, that in itself would be enough to make qualia "objective." But we don't have much of an idea on even beginning that. I'd say that figuring out that link is in the same category as mind-uploading or revival after cryogenic freezing in terms of being sufficiently advanced science as to be magic. I don't support the notion that science can never advance sufficiently, but also, it certainly hasn't, and so we lack the existence proof that this is possible.
07mk
4mo ago
Do those sensory inputs exist as an experience that I have outside of my memories, emotions, etc. though? If they don't, then how am I able to identify colors of entirely new things sans context? I'm not sure how that would make sense, so I conclude that I do experience sensory inputs, i.e. those sensory inputs are a form of qualia. Which then raises the question of if the qualia of me experiencing the sensory input from observing a stop sign is similar to that of someone else doing the same thing. We can empirically observe that the meaning that we ascribe to these sensory inputs are very similar, but that wouldn't actually get us to the similarity of the sensory inputs themselves.
It's also possible that, since qualia is intrinsically and, as-of-yet, inescapably subjective, the very concept of comparing qualia between two people is incoherent, and the best we can do is to figure out if the qualia of the meaning that we ascribe to sensory inputs are similar, as a proxy that we can never get better than.
07mk
4mo ago
It is physiologically dangerous for a woman to run a marathon, because it is for anyone, and, more importantly, it's more physiologically dangerous for a woman than for a man, for whatever it means when we make sweeping general statements comparing women and men, due to how the physical act of running a marathon is influenced by and influences one's physiology. I have no information by which to determine if this "uterus might fall out" characterization is weakmanning or just accurate, but certainly there's a large gap between "women ought to be banned because their uteri might fall out" and "women ought to be banned because the threshold we have for acceptable risk is crossed by females trying to run a marathon, even though it isn't crossed by males." Even if the latter is also pretty ridiculous by most standards that modern people find reasonable.
Not that this is an important point, but I would contend that "genuinely, in good faith, believing that people they dislike are evil monsters that all actual people agree must be destroyed, and propagating that honest belief" is merely describing how they promote the cheering of suffering of people they dislike. People generally don't like to think of themselves as vindictively cruel like that. And yet being vindictively cruel feels really good, and our biology is naturally pushing us towards it. Our brains are too clever for that, though, so we're very good at convincing ourselves that external factors are such that we are being helplessly forced to do what would've made us feel guilty if we consciously voluntarily chose to do them.
In this instance, it seems pretty trivial to convince oneself that anyone one dislikes in a certain way is actually belonging to some sort of subhuman. We've seen this happen pretty commonly throughout history, I think. To the extent that it may very well be non-trivial not to unintentionally, in good faith, repeat that pattern.
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