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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 1d ago

From what I see, you are the one who is refusing to commit to a basic meaning for the words you are using, even when offered a number of perfectly reasonable options (you could have pointed at some specific thing Corvos said, too, if you were so reluctant to put it in your own words). Would it be appropriate if I said in response that it seems like I'm arguing with a rightist of the oldschool antiintellectual type, who thinks that speaking analytically is some gay nerd shit?

I can assure you I was not trying to argue in bad faith here - I even tried, especially in the subthread with Corvos, to proactively suggest some interpretations, which you only would have to say yes or no to. I understand that you are waving at something that feels very obvious to you, and perhaps it is also obvious to Corvos and other people who share your outlook, but it isn't to me. People are not all the same! I don't look at my genitals, or anyone else's, and get any sort of feeling that I would describe as "purpose". I can abstractly imagine a number of ways in which someone could get a feeling like that, but depending on which one it is, the interpretation of your statement changes, and maybe I am off the mark with each and every of my guesses. If you want to make an argument based on that feeling, it is on you to explain it.

(The parallel with leftist gender arguments is really not there, because in those arguments rightists generally have no problem offering up serviceable definitions of gender. If the rightists had nothing better to say than "I know a woman when I see one", their case would be rather weak.)

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 1d ago

So e.g. nobody blinks twice if you say that humans (or tigers) need a green environment and lots of sunlight, because we evolved to expect these things. Likewise, mildly more controversial, the similar arguments made in favour of exercise and combat sports.

Well, I for my part blink a lot! If we just blindly look at everything that was a given in the ancestral environment, we find

some things like sunlight that people still seem to struggle if bereft of
some other things like eating meat and a highly diverse diet of foraged plants, doing without which seems to be basically fine for most everyone
some things like walking barefoot that are only advocated by weird people with benefits that are probably minimal, if at all existent
some things like having high parasite load all your life where the upsides of not doing it clearly far outweigh whatever downsides (higher propensity for allergies?)
some things like chimpanzee-style violent tribal conflict that we have decided we don't want and seem to be happier off without on an intellectual level, but that sometimes reassert themselves in strange ways.

How do we know which of these classes breeding is in? To begin with, apart from some very indirect methods like genetic drift estimation on gonosomes, what can we even infer about the exact type of "breeding" that we were optimised for? There are a lot of wobbly bridges being crossed here from what we actually know to the "it is imperative that all young men be given an opportunity to breed" conclusion.

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 1d ago

I blew past it because I actually can't make sense of your statement, and I can't make any more sense of it with your current restatement. Look, as I stated in my response to @Corvos one over, at first I thought I was going to do a little dance to exaggerate the degree to which I have no clue what you are trying to say because you were being deliberately obscurantist, but now I am confused to a point that no exaggeration is needed (and/or think that you are). What do you mean by the phrasing "identified with"? Should I read it as analogous to "dictated by [the canonical use of]"? That neither answers the question of why you single out the sexual organs as opposed to e.g. the liver as a giver of purpose, nor does it resolve the more fundamental question of how you make the leap from "something about you was optimised by the evolutionary process for X" to some variant of "it is imperative for you do X" that you are refusing to specify. Is one of the interpretations that I suggested in my response to Corvos in line with what you meant?

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 1d ago · Edited 1d ago

Your interpretation is not wholly off the mark, but more specifically I wanted @Tretiak to be explicit about the assumptions he is smuggling in. Evolution did not meaningfully intend for us to do anything, unless you believe in some flavour of supernatural will driving it; but without that you are really left with some statement along the lines of your ancestors reproducing having been causal to your existence (indisputable) + evolution probably having optimised you to pursue it (but this latter statement has a lot of obligatory footnotes that seem highly relevant to this question). So does he believe that there is some moral obligation to engage in the things that some process in the past optimised you for? Does he believe that not doing so locally, or globally, leads to unhappiness? Does he believe in some sort of duty to replicate the actions of your ancestors, along the lines of Tanner Greer's "procession of the centuries" (I can never shill this essay enough)? Each of those unpacked statements can be defended, as well as argued against, in a way that produces interesting discussion. On the other hand, just slapping a fancy label like "biological purpose" on it and refusing to elaborate seems to be a rhetorical trick that is designed to make that discussion impossible, instead just bamboozling people by keeping the different interpretations in convenient superposition.

(On the meta level, I do stand by the appropriateness of some degree of playing dumb as a response to obscurantism. If someone doesn't want me to get the true essence of their point, why should I be obliged to try and guess and walk into some rhetorical trap they have prepared?)

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 1d ago · Edited 1d ago

It seems to be that you have completely dodged the question. Words are supposed to mean things. What does "biological purpose" mean to you? It's not a concept that is in my dictionary, nor one that I encounter frequently enough to intuitively understand from the corpus like an LLM. As far as I can tell, you might just have strung together two words into a nonsensical compound that only gains an air of importance because of the meaning of the second one. I might as well retort that whatever your biological purpose is, the fear of grammatical asphyxiation which nobody can deny will happen to you if you are a horndog means you best give up on actualising it!

More to the point, M-W. says for purpose,

a: the reason something is done or used : intention b: the feeling of being determined to do or achieve something : resolution, determination c: the aim or goal of a person

Which one of these is it supposed be? People are not "done or used" in general although I guess you could e.g. say the purpose(a) of a surrogate mother is procreation; if it's (b) or (c) you just reduce the problem to needing to define a biological feeling or biological aim or goal.

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 2d ago

How exactly do you define "biological purpose"? How do you know your "biological purpose" is not dying on the battlefield so that the wealthiest man in your village gets enough loot to afford his 50th kid, or consuming more low-growing wild berries so that tapeworms, who happen to be the true Pinnacle of Creation and Protagonists of Biology, may thrive?

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 3d ago

On the other hand, back then you could just leave your 12 year olds at home to discreetly go to a drug fueled sex orgy by yourself over the weekend. Nobody needed to know, and CPS would not be called.

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 3d ago · Edited 3d ago

Personally I'd rather just see them bar kids from the event, which is what most events I've been to like this do.

They might not so much be concerned about the kids as about the parents who would not attend if they couldn't bring theirs. This is a general concern with long-standing communities - at some point some members will become parents, and you either have to find a way to take kids along to whatever the main community activities are, or exclude the parents, which will firstly reduce the community and secondly become another incentive for the remaining members to never have kids.

(Personally, in fact, I find the continuing proliferation of activities that moral busybodies won't let you do anymore if you have kids to be among the most impactful points on the antinatalist side.)

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 3d ago

Yes. I don't know how it was historically, but modern Finns are mostly committed to clothed saunaing, at least among strangers. Meanwhile, in Germany and Austria it has merged with the preexisting nudist culture to be universally mandatorily butt naked, and picked up some local innovations like ritual pouring of scented water on the heating elements followed by steam oven style manual fanning.

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 4d ago

On the surface, this seems like a very American hangup to me; some parts of Europe have significant amounts of public nudity (e.g. German sauna culture and nude beaches) that is accessible to the underage, and it does not seem to connect to either abuse or unhealthy development in any obvious ways. (Of course, the camp in question is in America, but why can't the US incubate some subcultures that are deviant from its prevalent norms?)

Also, you say that the children are to be "brought by parents" - surely the same parents who bring them to this camp might just as well expose them to nudity and sex at home, if they are as unconcerned by it as is implied by their participation in the camp.

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 4d ago

Is "the problem would not exist in a hypothetical situation we have no means of reaching" a useful insight, or does it even achieve anything apart from lazy demoralisation of those who do try to find something they can do to solve it?

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 4d ago

It's true and perhaps unfortunate, but a lot of people are guilty of that charge. At least the Trump admin was arguably elected on a clear mandate to prosecute the culture war, which means that in some sense they would be doing their job (if they penalise an organisation for employing her).

On the other hand, the lady was hired as a spokesperson for said "most important industry", and yet she clearly also cares about the culture war more than her nominal job! Otherwise, she surely wouldn't be doing all this culture warring with no regard for how it jeopardises Anthropic's cause under the current administration.

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 5d ago

What's the problem with her? Moussouris is a proven expert on information security with major relevant achievements in the field (including pioneering the DOD's own bug bounty program).

Expert or not, she is clearly a compulsive culture warrior with alignment opposite to the current US administration. The effect surely is similar as if, under a D administration, they hired, say, Andrew Tate (imagine he happened to also be a proven expert on information security) or Nick Fuentes.

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Friday Fun Thread for June 12, 2026

4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 7d ago · Edited 7d ago

Just as they say opposite of love is not hatred but indifference, there is a case that the opposite of a loudly pro-Gazan restaurant is not a loud choice to boycott it but eating there while disagreeing and not giving a shit. If you imagine the proprietors at their most brainrotten, which choice do you think would irk them more? The only way to kill toxoplasma is to refuse to be fazed by any part of its lifecycle.

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Friday Fun Thread for June 12, 2026

4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 8d ago

This reminds me of that one time the Bavarian independence party had to run in all of Germany for EU parliament elections, and they decided to run a campaign based on "don't you want to be rid of those damn Bavarians at last" in the parts of Germany that are not Bavaria.

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 9d ago

I think this is misrepresenting the complaint (at least the one I implicitly voiced here). The problem is not along the lines of "God wants me to be good, but I'm evil and can't help it, why did God make me this way?", and I can only see this framing emerging as a Christian (mis)interpretation of a mindset that is alien to them. Rather, it takes the form that the Christian God, as described in Christianity, is evil from the Atheist's perspective, and moreover is claimed to command everyone to do evil (as understood by the non-Christian) to earn his approval. It doesn't seem to me like the Christians I interact with (actively or passively) ever have a useful response to this, only being able to say that God is definitionally good and so the degree to which His purported nature disagrees with my understanding of the Good just is prima facie evidence of the latter being mistaken.

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 9d ago

If the AI revolution actually happens, the answer to this may depend on the definition of "self". Perhaps America-the-geopolitical-entity reaches new heights of power, but America-the-300something-million-people are paperclipped or left to live out the rest of their natural lifespans miserably under the watchful eye of Skynet.

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 9d ago

You are totally free to go to Hell if that's what you want.

Which version of it, the "separation from God" one or the "fire and brimstone" one? If it's the latter, "hey, I'm not forcing you to do anything, I will just torture you for{ever, _aeons} if you don't obey" doesn't register as a particularly compelling vision of freedom. I know that especially Evangelical Christians would consider "God is evil" to be very nearly an oxymoronic statement, but if their God created me, why did He equip me with a moral compass that says it?

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 10d ago

Would those actually result in America "righting itself", even ignoring the expected self-harm from the backlash due to the large number of Americans against those two things? Criminal illegal immigrants don't really seem like a problem that is big enough except psychologically, unless the illegal immigration itself is considered a sufficient crime, in which case kicking them out would probably kick the bottom out of agriculture and other menial labour heavy areas; purging the commies might entail destroying much of the tech industry and university research, because a lot of the most productive people there are about the most proudly self-identifying commies around.

"Sure, destroying the things I hate will cause a lot of disruption at first, but what will grow back afterwards will be so much better because it will not be encumbered by the things I hate" is a line of argumentation that has a bad enough track record (including, in particular, from assorted commies!) that one should not just accept it on faith.

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 10d ago

I always wondered if Lewis considered the ultimate application that quote automatically suggests, being a card-carrying believer in the most supremely omnipotent moral busybody of all. I feel like the benevolent deity who fails to understand the wants and needs of His subjects is a somewhat exhausted trope now, but was it already back then?

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 14d ago

Right, but it seemed like @OliveTapenade was partially coming at this from a "who are these newcomers to lecture us, the original Right, about what is Right" angle. (This kind of mirrors the "tankie left" vs. "mental health left" (I still think "Ctrl-Left" is a great coinage) divide, though in the US the latter has comprehensively won while the Alt-Right is at most a strong minority within the Right)

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 14d ago · Edited 14d ago

I take it as an answer in line with what @aaa said below, which is something like "it's not in the Bible, but clearly something that was believed by early (more Western than the founders?) Christians within 200-300 years of founding". Except for the longer excerpt from Augustine, though, the arguments don't really seem to obviously be implying an outright "personhood"/complete equivalence of fetuses to central examples of "persons" angle, instead going for general pro-natalism (most obviously in the "poisonous drugs to secure barrenness" text: it's associating abortion with contraception which involves no "conceived seed" at all, and the "conceived seed" vocabulary + implication that it has not yet "received vitality" also sounds like it considers the fetus less than human).

At least without context, Jeremiah 1:5 sounds like it's more about God knowing the future. If you want to read meaning into the phrasing in "formed you in the womb", it only seems to suggest that "you" were formed at some point while being in the womb (so between the point where the fertilised egg leaves the tube and birth).

Today many Christians would presumably add, "Today, we have greater scientific understanding, and therefore do know what Augustine did not, which is that life begins at conception."

Sorry, but this seems like what Scott called "Eulering" to me. Defining life, for moral purposes, is not the magisterium of science to begin with.

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 14d ago

It was a fantasy insofar as he described it as a generic party with a generic GigaChad in attendance, not a party which was attended by people who were specifically personal fans of GigaChad. If the story is just "there exists a guy who has some girl fans he can objectify and they enjoy it", that's not saying much of interest about the "underlying true nature of complaints about objectification" at all.

There exist cannibals who someone wanting to be eaten throwing themselves at them, but this does not make a case for your neighbourhood involuntarily-merely-wannabe cannibal that all the people who want to lock him up if he voices his desires are being hypocrites who are just waiting for a chad like Meiwes to come along. He could make a case that it is some kind of cosmic injustice that Meiwes found his willing meal but he has nobody, just like Roy could make a case that it is unjust that Clavicular has an army of hoes and he doesn't, but this does nothing at all to lower the legitimacy of complaints of those who just don't want to be eaten, or don't want to be objectified, or don't want to work 80 hour weeks, at all.

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4bpp Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs 14d ago

Do the alt-right agree that "pre-natal people" are a thing, to begin with? The maximalist pro-abortion position does not seem any less consistent to me (as someone who holds it): something that does not have a record of autonomous human experience does not count as a "person", and if anything is wrong with killing it, it's not in the same category as what is wrong with killing people. (I can see an argument for not pulling the plug on the braindead from the perspective of "surviving relatives have sentimental attachment to the body" only.)

(Incidentally, I've been wondering, is there a literalist Biblical case in Christianity for the personhood of fetuses, or is this something that has been coloured in retroactively by modern analysis/apologetics "through a Christian lens"?)

to accuse the conservative right of 'LARP' or of being 'leftists' is surely absurd.

I think there's a great case to be made that Christianity and Leftism are closely related, which only rubs people the wrong way because in the US the majority of those who identify with the respective movements have evolved to be mutually disgusted tribal archenemies. It seems kind of like what happens when you point out to modern Greeks all the ways in which their culture, genetics and language have been influenced by the Turks.

Alt-righters, whose LARP of choice more often than not is some sort of BAP-style Classical elitism, seem to be one group that definitively has the right to call Christians "left-wing", because the thing they are LARPing in doing so (Classical Antiquity) was overturned by Christianity with a memetic package that through a modern lens very much parses as such.

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