07mk
9hr 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
9hr 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
12hr 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
13hr 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.
07mk
13hr ago
I don't think there is "something it is like" to see the color crimson, aside from the associations with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc. And if you ask whether other people have the same associations, the question becomes an empirical one, and one we know how to tackle.
I don't follow this. What is being associated with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc.? When you see a random drop of fresh blood on the ground during your walk, you might identify it as "red" because it appears similar to fire trucks and stop signs and strawberries which you were taught at a young age were "red," but what is it that you're comparing in order to associate these things in the first place? I would characterize it as comparing the qualia of observing a stop sign with observing fresh blood on the ground, which would be another way of describing "what it is like" to see the color red. If there's no there there, and there's no actual experience of seeing the color red when you observe fresh blood or a stop sign, then how is it that you're associating the color of the blood to the color of a stop sign?
07mk
1d ago
I don't think I have any particular insights into this, but I do think other commenters have gotten at the truth of the matter, along the likes of Trump violating Blue Tribe sanctity and getting away with it or signalling OUTGROUP or whatever. Now, if you think about this for a few minutes, this isn't a dissatisfying answer. But, on first blush, I used to find this answer dissatisfying, because it just moves the question back a step: why did the Blue Tribe/Dems/liberal leftists/etc. decide that there were certain things that they held sacred, such that if they were violated without censure, they would lose their shit?
Because, in the decades leading up to Trumps POTUS run in 2015, much of Blue Tribe rhetoric was based around categorical rejection of one's emotional reaction as having moral authority. This had been happening for decades with narratives around stereotypes or implicit bias, and more recently with the victorious fight for gay marriage, which was quite explicit in stating that one's disgust reaction to something has no relationship to that thing's ethical or moral considerations.
One mistake that I personally think is reasonable to make - because I made it - is believing that the fact that much of Blue Tribe rhetoric supported this implied that much of Blue Tribe thinking supported this. Which would imply that, when members of the Blue Tribe noticed that they had an emotional reaction to Trump due to doing things that offended their sensibilities, they would understand that such an emotional reaction provides precisely the same amount of moral information as their born again Christian uncle Jim reaction to seeing 2 leather daddies kissing at the local pride parade and treat it similarly to how they treat Jim's homophobic rants. But evidently, a very significant portion of Blue Tribers do not do this and, instead, take this emotional reaction of theirs as seriously as if it were shot into their brains as a command by God.
I think what we observed 10 years ago now is a shift from the Blue Tribe being rarely challenged in its commitment to this idea, because the landscape was almost entirely filled with things that barely offended their sensibilities (i.e. "norms," which is really just another way of describing "tradition") - at best, they offended them just enough to create a credible-looking example of how, unlike those Red Tribe ignoramuses, they're virtuous enough to tolerate being offended! - to them constantly being challenged, and that commitment being proven to be just cudgels with which to beat their ideological opponents rather than actual principles they hold.
It's arguable if "no one is principled" is a satisfying answer, but I at least see it as the solution to the puzzle that I had first started noticing a year or two before Trump's 1st POTUS run.
07mk
1d ago
I got about halfway thru S1 before getting bored. There's some girl power/male cuck wokeness in there, but from what I saw, there was nothing too egregious. What really got me, which is wokeness-adjacent or -like but not quite on the bullseye, was a scene showing a couple of apparent-stoners whose apparent job is to hold zombies in cages, who had the protagonist captured IIRC, but then through a set of boneheaded decisions, lets everyone loose in a way that causes the freed zombies to come at them and murder them. They were depicted as having been doing this sort of guard duty for some time, yet they had the attitude and competence of a couple of potheads that were hired on as line cooks because no one else was available that day, so either they should've gotten got a long time before the protagonist encountered them, or they should've been competent enough not to make those obvious errors. The whole thing just reeked of "the universe bends around the (female, headstrong, whose primary flaw is being too stubborn in her ambition and sense of justice) protagonist" to me, which, hey, this is a video game adaptation after all, but it's a video game adaptation.
07mk
4d ago
I didn't finish Hogwarts Legacy because it turned out not to be my type of game, but I also recall that the student body seemed rather more diverse than what one would expect there in the early 20th century, with one student who was a major supporting character coming from some wizarding school in Africa.
07mk
6d ago
I think all the rhetoric about how Trump's goons could break down every trans person's door any day now, nation-wide, would be enough to unbalance even someone living in the queerest neighborhood in Portland.
Heck, I'd say it's more likely to unbalance someone living in such a neighborhood, because it's disproportionately in those neighborhoods that such memes about Trump's goons tend both to get spread and to get taken seriously. I'd guess that the proportion of trans people who take such things seriously enough to meaningfully affect their mental health would be small in either case, and that it'd almost certainly be much bigger in progressive spaces.
07mk
7d ago
I mean, it's hard to gradually groom someone who's attacking you with an axe, isn't it?
More to the point, pre-/low-teen girls (or boys, for that matter) aren't known for great epistemics or rationality. It's possible for a 12 year old girl to incorrectly but reasonably, by 12-year-old definitions of reasonable, to believe that an axe would provide her with some significant amount of extra protection against grooming gangs.
After all, even fully grown adult women with brains that have had time to develop often take inconvenient steps to protect themselves against the stranger-jumping-you type of rape, despite the fact that those are quite rare. I think it's the viscerality/salience and availability bias, like how people often get more paranoid about flying than about driving, because plane crashes are severe and usually fatal to most people involved, and the news tends to report on them more than any particular banal car crash.
Now, these specific girls? Not having seen the video, I cast no vote, but my default presumption is that, outside of what's directly seen on video, there's no meaningful wider conclusion that can be made just from a brief out-of-context video that takes place as part of a longer interaction. Too many unknown unknowns.
07mk
7d ago
That is certainly one dimension along which that particular type of person will benefit according to her own desires, as intended. I suspect that this, even moreso than other typical decisions which are already filled with them, is the kind of decision that has a lot of unintended consequences with significant impact in one's quality of life.
07mk
7d ago
From my perspective, it seems pretty obvious that a lot of FtM types in particular are far less interested in becoming men than they are afraid of becoming women, and so their "dysphoria" is driven more by a desire to prevent adulthood. It's less about what they transition to ("boys"), than what they don't transition to (adults).
Given the memes separating "women and children" from "men," there's something deeply ironic and perverse and even darkly hilarious about this. Of course, an FTM doesn't transition to becoming a man, but rather a transman, and I have to wonder, once we remove all the ideologically-based praise and support from being trans, if a typical FTM's experience as an adult in society is closer to that of a masculine/low status woman or that of a median man.
07mk
7d ago
Could transgenderism — for the ones not seeking sexual gratification — be caused by the mind being “stuck” in the age where one learns about their body, due to some obscure early life trauma or a lack of social affirmation, and their mind tries to rekindle the feelings of that age through the artificial rediscovery of their body via “coming out” and hormones? This is something to dwell on, because there does seem to be a sub-expression of transgenderism which is obsessed with nostalgic things but which is not sexualized, and this is a distinct from the other subexpression which craves its own sexual humiliation (eg that Canadian teacher with the enormous boobs who sent her one sextape to her HR lady; the Matrix-dominatrix brothers…)
I see a lot of potential insight in this. One pattern I noticed is that the way that some transgender people's understanding of being the opposite sex appear almost nostalgic, certainly childish, and naive. Namely, MTF appear to see being a woman as akin to being a nubile, young, attractive woman, while FTM appear to see being a man as akin to being a high status man. Which are pretty likely and reasonable misconceptions for someone to form at adolescence.
Now, these are common enough misconceptions among non-trans people that it's possible that there's nothing particularly going on there. It's also possible that these misconceptions being so powerful play into making identifying as trans appear much more attractive. It's unfortunate that we lack a credible social science institution with resources to research something like this, since it's had such huge, transformative effects in our society just in the past decade.
Pronouns being, much like many/most things to do with trans/gender ideology, sacrosanct, is pretty mainstream in my experience in progressive/"woke" culture in America. I didn't pay much attention to it, but the few times I ran into it on Twitter and such, it was common to see people being berated for not using Chris Chan's preferred pronouns, and in general it tends to pop up whenever there's some news of some trans person doing something most people agree is wrong. I also recall seeing a scene from some CW Batman show where a cop berates another cop for misgendering the suspect they're interrogating and kicks him out of the interrogation room, followed by him telling the suspect something like how they might be on different sides, but that doesn't mean he has to be an asshole to him, or something.
Of course, opinions tend to vary, as always, but one of the core tenets of this ideology is the relationship between someone's position on the progressive stack (i.e. oppression Olympics or the oppression totem pole) and the truth of their words or justice of their actions. As a result, in practice, the most extreme views espoused by some individual at the highest point on the totem pole with the least scruples about exercising social and physical acts for enforcement set the agenda. Straight men/lesbian women not discriminating against transwomen in dating/sex or including transwomen as full, undifferentiated members of women's sports teams and their lockers are other fairly extreme positions that seem not that commonly held when talking to individuals in private, but in practice, there's rarely more than some non-committal mumbling and foot-dragging when the extreme true believers demand all of society submit to these things, resulting in everyone having to behave in public as if they agree with those things.
07mk
7d ago
No it it isn't. The causation is completely reversed. There's nothing in the comment to which you're replying that indicates that the commenter believes that his ability to believe something implies anything to do with anything, including how bad his enemies are. The commenter is explaining why he has the ability to believe something, and that it is due to his enemies "sources like the BBC and the UK police" having established themselves to be bad as dependable information sources. You can argue that they have not established themselves to be such, but there's nothing in the comment indicating that the commenter's ability to believe this is proof/evidence/argument/etc. for the notion that these sources are bad sources. That they are bad sources is already part of the premise, not something being argued for.
07mk
8d ago
I had a heated 3 month fling with FTL back when it came out before I went somewhere for vacation and quit cold turkey. It was first roguelike (and one of my last - definitely not a good genre for me), and adjusting to the expectations of extreme punishment plus cruel RNG took a while. I remember it took me dozens of tries to win the game for the first time, and then I beat it immediately on the next run. And from then on, it was like a 50/50, which really surprised me, because of how utterly wrecked I used to get, and it's not as if the challenge had changed by leveling up or something.
In the middle of it, it felt to me like roleplaying in a very pure way, creating a narrative of a desperate ship captain in this scifi setting who needs to pull on all resources and luck to barely edge out survival for one more node. I don't think I've gotten quite the same experience from other games. And, unfortunately, I think I'd prefer to keep it that way, given how much time I'm likely to waste if I found something similar.
07mk
8d ago
Nick Fuentes is probably the second most important person to watch on the Republican side after Trump himself. He has a lot of "energy", and has the benefit of being extremely online. People keep making the mistake that the "real world" is more important than a small fringe of online crazies, and they keep getting proven wrong over and over and over (e.g. with woke, the alt right, gender identity on Tumblr). The arc of MAGA is long, but it bends towards Based.
I know very little about Fuentes himself, but the analysis here seems wrong. The alt-right, as best as I can tell, has had pretty much no impact in actual policy and very little in terms of national discourse around politics and ideology. Which is as expected from a small fringe of online crazies.
The "woke," and gender identity on Tumblr (subset or, at best, nearly fully overlapping set with "woke"), on the other hand, have obviously had immense and consequential influence in both, and this is due to the fact that they weren't a small fringe of online crazies. Rather, by the time this sort of argument was created to shut down the people trying to bring attention to the anti-liberalism of the ideology that would go on to evolve to something called "woke," ie around early 2010s, it had already been hegemonic in academia for at least a decade and nearly ubiquitous for multiple decades, with plenty of signs of mainstream journalism and mainstream entertainment getting bought in.
So things correctly labeled as a small fringe of online crazies had little impact on real world politics and the everyday life that it influences, while things incorrectly labeled as such did have big impact.
Maybe this Fuentes character's ideas will break into the mainstream over the next 3 years, but so far, him being just a big fish in a small, fringe, online, crazy pond doesn't make me think he's particularly worth paying attention to with respect to national politics.
07mk
9d ago
There are some people that treat advice as a full on gift giving process. They expect accolades for giving the gift. They expect the receiver to at least pretend that they liked the gift. And the gift they'd always like in return is for the receiver to act on their advice. This seems like a toxic approach to me.
As an aside, this seems like a toxic approach to gift-giving, not just advice-giving. The entire point of a gift is that you're giving it to someone without expectation for anything in return; that's the very nature of the gift that makes it a gift, as otherwise it would be an implicit bribe or payment. The gratitude and pomp and circumstance can be pleasant and even appreciated when they're there, but expecting it in return for a gift means that it wasn't a gift in the first place, it was a payment, in order to get the receiver to play-act the part of "grateful gift recipient" for the gift giver's satisfaction.
07mk
12d ago
I saw on Twitter someone comment that the idea that the company that owns Marvel, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones would need to look for a new IP to help draw in young male audiences in their teens & 20s is pretty hilarious and absurd. You could probably have put any random 8th grade boy in charge of any one of these franchises back when Disney acquired them and turned them into at least good draws for that crowd, if not great. Yet the actual executives in charge appear to have less competence than that (or, perhaps, different incentives than making the best product or most money).
Makes me think there could be a modern remake of Big where he becomes a studio exec instead of a toy store VP and greenlights hits over the adult execs. Would have to be a longer timeframe and also, I'm guessing Big probably won't get a remake anytime soon given the implied statutory rape.
07mk
12d ago
I beat Stellar Blade recently, with all the achievements, collectibles, etc. It caused a minor culture war kerfuffle in the video game community due to having a conventionally attractive female protagonist being highly sexualized in costumes and camera angles and such. It was also the first 3D action game of this type by Shift Up, which is better known for Goddess of Victory: Nikke, which is a gacha game definitely on the "gooner" side of the spectrum, so it was actually reasonable to wonder if it was just going to be shallow eye candy, but it turned out to be right up there with the best action games I've played recently, like Elden Ring or Lies of P (latter of which was also the 1st 3D action game by that dev, IIRC).
Looking at trailers, I remember wondering if it was going to be a DMC-like or Ninja Gaiden-like, something sorely lacking in the industry these days (we'll see how NG4 does soon). Turned out to be a Sekiro-like more than anything, with a similar perfect parry-based posture system, except it's discrete perfect parry counts, and it doesn't recover automatically over time, and it's not a deathblow but rather big hit like a visceral in Bloodborne. It doesn't feel as natural as, nor does it incentivize aggression quite as much as Sekiro's, but it also had its own quirks that I appreciated, like being able to count to set up for viscerals right after boss phase transitions. It also had perfect dodges, which slowed down time during the dodge like Witch Time in Bayonetta, though that didn't extend to giving you time to punish.
These mechanics only work if the enemies are designed properly for them, and that's where the game really shone. The bosses were the highlights, but for every enemy, it was clear the devs thought carefully about how to communicate timings to the player via animations and attack patterns. It wasn't as well executed as From Soft's best work both in terms of telegraphing attacks and pushing the player to really tight openings, but it was only a step or two behind.
I found Normal difficulty too easy after the 1st 2 bosses and restarted the game on Hard, which was originally not available until NG+ with an upgraded health bar. It took me 1-2 hours of sometimes dozens of deaths for most bosses like this, but the design of the bosses was such that it was a fun learning experience the whole time. Regular mobs in the overworld were also 2-shotting me, so exploration was slow and almost souls-like in pace, so it took me about 70 hours to beat the game with all side quests, but played normally, I've heard it's about 20-30 hours.
Like Sekiro, it had skill trees instead of stat upgrades using souls, and also you didn't drop your Exp when you died, so the souls-like "enemies revive when you rest" system didn't really mean a whole lot. Besides weak and strong attacks on Square and Circle which could be chained in different ways for combos, there were special attacks called Bursts and Beta Attacks used via L1 or R1 + face button, which used independent but related resources that recharged through actions during combat. I think what made the combat so satisfying, besides the parries, was the managing of these special attacks and their unique abilities, like i-frames, self-heal, or attack speed-up.
So recommended highly to anyone who enjoys 3rd person action games. Especially on PC where the mods are aplenty, and also, it's incredibly well optimized and bug-free. Zero crashes in 120+ hours and solid consistent 60fps+ on my 4090. I'm glad they decided not to contribute yet another souls-like to the flood of them in the industry right now. Again, it's heavily souls-inspired, but it also draws from many other games, creating its own thing. I just wish it drew more from the crazy action games like DMC, since crowd control and 1-on-many combat in general was mostly not great.
I've heard people criticize the story for being too predictable, but I thought it was exactly right for this kind of game, which almost feels like a throwback to mostly straightforward action games from 360/PS3 era. I found it funny just how much the game took inspiration from Nier: Automata, what with the sexy woman flying down from space to the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is Earth to fight off the beings that took it over from humans, but then discovering the deep dark secret of what really happened, etc. They even hired the same composer to do a lot of the soundtrack, so I'm pretty sure they knew what they were doing.
07mk
14d ago
Thanks for clarifying. Your comment makes sense. Your belief that crushedorange's comment above isn't a case of action which is intended to "lead to more people being free to express themselves" seems almost certain to be true based on humans in general and my vague, fuzzy memory of his comments in the past specifically.
07mk
14d ago
Fair enough, crushedorange's comment indicates pretty clearly that in his specific case, he abandoned his principles. An excessively charitable reading would be that he learned that his naive implementation of free speech principles actually harmed free speech and, as such, abandoned those principles and replaced them with ones that would increase free speech. But there's no way to actually figure out if he's upset that following his previous principles meant that free speech as a principle was being failed, or he's partisanly upset that following those meant that his side was losing, and though the former would be charitable, the latter seems far more likely.
But on this:
My claim was that for a commitment to free speech/intellectual freedom/etc. to count as a "moral principle", it must be an axiomatic belief, not a context-dependent one. You must believe that all else being equal, it is wrong to suppress speech, in and of itself. You can't just believe that it's inadvisable to do so if you want a certain kind of society; and you certainly can't just believe that being pro-free speech lead to good life outcomes for you personally. You have to believe, consistently, that censorship is in itself an evil which you should try to minimize.
This seems like a straightforward way of restating what I said:
claiming that following principles deontologically are better than doing so consequentially
If a commitment to free speech doesn't count as a "moral principle" if you implement it by taking action that leads to more people being more free to express themselves instead of taking action that leads to any particular instance of someone you observe speaking being unpunished, then that's just straightforward supremacy of deontology over consequentialism as a way of doing morality.
07mk
14d ago
Because there are such things as moral imperatives which you should follow even if they do not bring you material benefits; indeed, even if following them costs you dear. Having been persecuted does not give you a license to persecute in turn, any more than having been raped give you a license to rape your rapist. It's not about what it gets you - it's about right and wrong.
This seems to be claiming that following principles deontologically are better than doing so consequentially. Which may be the case, but not really argued for. I do think there's a strong argument for it, in that consequentialist calculations are irredeemably fraught with bias in such a way as to be meaningless, since people will always, in good faith, calculate the consequences in a way that is biased in their favor.
But the case for taking principles consequentially isn't weak, either. If naively following some principle in a deontological way provably/reliably/logically/etc. reduces [Good Thing], then how do we justify calling the principle "Good?" Well, we don't need to follow it in some naive deontological way, but rather by following consequences.
Let's say a doctor has a personal principle that he will endeavor to make his patients no worse than the counterfactual of if they never saw him. Counterfactuals are intrinsically hard to predict and fraught with bias. So he might decide to avoid his personal bias and just take the deontological position that any action that harms the patient's health is out of bounds for him. Puncturing someone's skin certainly harms the patient's health, even if it's nearly trivial, and so he never draws blood for tests or gives his patients IV (or allows his staff to). This doctor would be less effective than a doctor who follows the exact same principle, but thinks in longer time horizons and figures that the harm of a syringe prick on a patient is outweighed by the benefits of what it enables, in terms of leaving his patient no worse off than otherwise. And in society at large, people who believe in the same principle would commonly prefer the latter consequentialist doctor as fulfilling their principles better than the former deontologist one.
So we could follow the principle of free speech by just never punishing anyone for saying anything (with rare exceptions, etc.) and let the chips fall where they may. I would prefer this, personally. We could also follow it by checking how certain behaviors affect people's ability to exercise free speech in society and then take the action that seems most likely to increase it (or not reduce it or maximize some metric or etc.). I would prefer not this, personally, because, again, this sort of prediction is so fraught with bias that I don't know that there's a way to do it credibly. But I think it's perfectly reasonable to disagree with me on that.
07mk
14d ago
It's a few hundred millions, max. After that, the sun will slowly increase its irradiance by a relatively small percentage, resulting in a runaway greenhouse effect from atmospheric water vapor, which will end the carbon cycle on Earth.
Ah, I had thought we had at least a billion, but I hadn't done that much research. I'll take your correction at face value. You also answer here the question you asked earlier in this comment about what catastrophes I'm worried about. I'm worried about the big one.
So, those timelines are so extremely long, we can worry about them when we get really, really bored. The problems we have to solve before that need to be solved here, because solving them here is cheaper than living in space or on Mars.
I disagree. We won't ever get really, really bored, at least that's my prediction based on our evident ability to find extremely banal and inconsequential problems extremely interesting when there's a dearth of consequential problems that are nipping at our heels. And escaping boredom is a really bad motivator for accomplishing something as difficult as sustainable life off Earth. If we take the attitude that the timeline is just so long that we can worry about it in the future, that's a formula for just never doing it at all and letting humanity get snuffed out. One might hope that the human spirit would overcome and survive when push comes to shove, and I'd guess that it would, but I think things would be more pleasant if push didn't come to shove. Plenty of people survived the Titanic and made it to America, but I think it would have been more pleasant for everyone involved if that had been accomplished by the ship just reaching its destination safely instead of having to rely on lifeboats and another ship coming around to pick those up. If we can clearly see an iceberg in our path, it's best to plan for it now instead of relying on future us to solve it when there's less time to work out the kinks.
And there's no need to solve cheaper problems before expensive problems. Our problem-solving abilities aren't fungible like money, and we can devote resources both to expensive and cheap problems at the same time in a way that's more beneficial overall for humanity. Obviously no one can actually work out a credible measure of "benefit to humanity" or whatever, there are arguments to be made about the details, including the notion that, in 2025, all resources devoted to researching and accomplishing space travel would be better spent on something else on Earth, which I disagree with but which I think isn't unreasonable. But that's a different notion than the one that there's no point to humans living in space. Even before a planet/solar system-destroying catastrophe, there's a point, because living in space will force individuals living there to innovate and learn the things we don't even know that we don't know about how to live in space, so that we can actually get it right when shit hits the fan for all of Earth (some of them may will die along the way as they encounter these unknown unknowns, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make).
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.
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