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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
As a side note, it does seem that generally speaking white people more or less represent the standard of attractiveness/desirability in the world and have for some time. With respect to white women, I recall reading somewhere that during the days of African piracy, lighter skinned women carried a higher price in slave markets. I'm not sure about men. Perhaps after Europeans conquered and dominated the world, women of all races started associating white men with power and status.
I think it's even more soft than hard power, nowadays. In my observations, those who prefer East Asian media over American media also tend to value partners of the corresponding ethnicity higher, which is relevant as the bubbles in which this preference has reached fixation keep getting bigger and more mainstream. I have already seen social groups in which the (comparatively handsome, successful) white guys quietly mald as the resident loose girls openly prefer to chase mediocre Japanese and Korean guys.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
Arguments are soldiers. More specifically, in this case, the mistake is assuming that, say, "datacenters use too much water/we should waste less water" is the reflection of a terminal value. "Datacenters bad" is much closer to terminal, whatever it is; the role of the water narrative is more akin to "finally I have found a good story to convince the sheeple to join the fight against datacenters".
If you take it away, this does not, in their eyes, make datacenters any better, but just makes it harder for them to get agreement and sympathy. So it is with everything else; telling any doomer that their legible indicators of doom are a lie is just telling them to shut up and endure their feeling that everything is rotten alone. (Crime statistics tend to do similar things for right-wingers.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
Russia is still not doing a universal draft (of the type that would involve calling in masses of people who have finished mandatory service) or sending particularly many mandatory-service conscripts, and even then there is a big caveat that distinguishes it from Western systems: if you go straight to university from school, your being "drafted" does not actually entail even having to stay at the barracks for any amount of time, but instead you get some substitute military leadership programme as part of your university education, similar perhaps to ROTC in the US. Therefore even if they sent all the mobiks into the grinder it could still arguably be eugenic.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
I rather believe something like the converse - most instances of what we consider "hypocrisy" are actually mostly tradeoffs between values, perhaps more specifically outwardly displayed ones and embarrassing/"naked self-interest" ones that are kept concealed. I don't think "naked self-interest" is a clearly delineated, distinct category of values anyway.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
Well, the question is also how it compares to the situation with Russia and Ukraine; I'm sure there are many who don't want to lean too far out of the window there in terms of asserting restrictions on the conduct of besieged countries lest it come around to bite them now or later. Of course there is some asymmetry in that Ukraine and allies have a clearer-cut case that the ships they are attacking are in some sense Russian rather than merely serving Russian interests, but I don't know how much bite this distinction would have before a court of legal autists when most of the other gulf countries are hosting US military bases.
(The comparison here works, and somewhat fails with your Israel example, because in objective terms most ships passing through both the Suez canal and the Strait of Hormuz belong to American allies or can be argued to have a causal link to the continued ability of the US to prosecute the war. Conversely, if somehow Europe and the US either grew a spine or grew enough Muslims to collectively assume a posture of support for Hamas against Israel and then Israel did the thing you described, I doubt that, say, the Chinese or Argentinians or any other mostly neutral party would be getting their panties in a twist over this.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
I never liked the proverb that goes like hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue (why is paying a tribute a compelling metaphor here?), but the underlying sentiment is somewhat relevant. Specifically, (1) unlike the rat-adjacent crowd, most people don't have absolute, immutable values nor are even particularly disturbed by the prospect of value drift; (2) they experience "conflicting" values/terms in their value function (ones that you can't maximise simultaneously) not as a fun math problem but as painful and embarrassing; (3) if a pair of values they hold keeps causing problems as in 2., they will happily gradually do away with one of them as in 1. (At some point vice is driven to default?)
Now, add to this that most people also, apart from any other values, hold pragmatism and reasonableness as a value, as well as (more cynically) being perceived as following universal, elegant principles of the kind that get mentioned as a Philosophy in textbooks, as opposed to boring non-universalisable ones like "more power to my race". As a result, it's generally actually quite effective to promulgate the statement that some object-level aspect of your target's value system is inconsistent, impractical and/or non-universalisable. They will feel the tension between the "LARP as philosopher-king" value and whatever other value you are challenging (e.g. abortion views, religion, in-group favouritism) and often enough the other value will be the easier one for them to do away with.
(Of course, this also creates the continued demand for apologetics, * Studies and other word slop that basically serves to shield the object-level values from having to be traded off against the acting-reasonable value.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
The atmosphere in Budapest last night was quite something. The streets were awash with people getting piss drunk, shouting, high-fiving passersby, climbing up on buses, cars honking late into the night; one could really imagine this is what it was like when the Berlin Wall fell. I almost can't wait for the inevitable disappointment to set in so I can get more mileage out of the evergreen "first time?" image macro.
I really had the sense that the opposition supporters were deathly anxious right until the moment the preliminary results started rolling in, perhaps expecting some Trump 2016 style flood of dark-matter enemy voters or shenanigans popping their bubble. Someone with good understanding of crowd psychology had the great idea to let a veritable rave to be held in the square in front of the parliament building through the evening after polls closed (tagline: "More Techno in Parliament") which allowed people to blow off steam, but judging from people's demeanor and the sheer amount of vomit puddles around its periphery I would guess there was a lot of steam built up to blow off indeed (while opposition (after)parties through the previous days had more of an exam night vibe).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
But does this matter? I think you will struggle to find any widely supported position where the majority of believers can articulate an intelligent justification. You can argue about whether it is an effective strategy to attack the "head-empty believers" directly (by way of shame or ridicule or whatever you think works), but even if it is, performing that attack here will not reach them and only shit up this discussion space.
Also, it stands to reason that those who do hold the position for more intelligent reasons hold an outsize influence on it; even the ones who just think on the level of "fat moneybag CEO bad" are vaguely reassured by some belief that some smart and high-status people can articulate a more robust line of reasoning for why it is so. Far more interesting and fruitful, then, to engage with that line.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
The circumstance that he stepped up to crank Moloch's ratchet when Anthropic made a principled stand to not play ball with the War Department probably was a factor. Not only was this a strike in favour of "you can't stop or circumscribe AI, if you try to someone else will just pull ahead" for the game theorists and doomers, it also put Altman in the Trump stooge/useful idiot box for Blue normies.
Well, David Deutsch (of quantum computing fame), for example, is in fact Jewish. Maybe there is something like "the lady doth protest too much" class naming?
On the main topic, my impression is that of all the present-day European cultures, Hungary perhaps has the most extensive Jewish influence, showing most obviously in aspects like cuisine and music as well as plain public visibility (Budapest has a remarkable number of random shops with Hebrew signboards), while there also does not seem to be nearly as much of a sense of gap/otherness between them and the rest of the population as elsewhere. If I recall correctly, even Horthy at most reluctantly did the bare minimum of participation in the Nazis' anti-Jew agenda, and nobody likes the guy thy briefly installed to replace him in the final year. Moreover, ever since Trianon, Hungary has a very similar "beleaguered nation-state bearer of a totally unique people's destiny" self-image. It is therefore unsurprising that they feel some kinship with Israel.
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