ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Plant your stick in the ground and say you'll have no part in it if you must: the great tide of technological progress will sweep on just fine without you.
I for one happen to think we can just choose to not commit collective suicide.
Perhaps in the far future there will be people who have been dependent on external software peripherals for so long (generations of them, in fact) that their native pain receptors have atrophied to the point of disuse, like the appendix
I don't know about pain receptors, but the general process we're talking about is already happening. Kids growing up with smartphones are getting their brains fried. ChatGPT will fry them even more. It's not going to be like cooking, with the ability to start a fire being passed down culturally. It's not even that they'll become dependant on ChatGPT, or whatever, and will have to outsource their thinking to it. ChatGPT will just suck their skills out, and but won't be able to offer an appropriate replacement.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore.
It's literally being debated in the post before yours...
Any ruler will face pressure from his subjects. If we call that "democratic norms" I'll be even more confused as to why some countries are said to have them, and others are not.
Like, ages ago I was listening to a libertarian podcast talking about the news, and they had this clip of a western journalist grilling the Saudi king about why he doesn't just give equal rights to women. "You're the king", she said, "can't you just declare whatever you want?". His responses were a stream of evasions, centering around the theme of how much he loves his subjects. The libertarian hosts of the show were utterly clueless and were just making fun of how he's not answering the question, but in my opinion he was giving a clear and obvious response - this is what my subjects want, if I overturn the social order in such a drastic way, they'll hang me from a lamppost by tomorrow morning. Is that a "democratic norm"?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
21hr ago
Downvoting can get people stuck in a filter making his posts invisible until the mods manually approve them. OTOH it's also possible to permanently get out of it with enough upvotes (and there was a "charity drive" to do so, where I did my part by upvoting like 5 pages of his posts).
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
23hr ago
It was a hypothetical example.
I think smartphones/TikTok/AI are making us lose our attention, our ability to analyze and to think, and they don't offer anything in return (AI could in theory take over our thinking for us, but I doubt it will, and even if it did it raises the question of who's going to fix it if it breaks down). It's akin to becoming dependent on cooking, and losing our ability to do so, but it's not literally the same thing.
Enslaving human mind uploads is in a similar ballpark of eminently sensible economic decisions.
(...) What humans might have instead are UBI
If the minds can't support themselves economically, they obvious incentive is to pull the plug on them, so you don't have to pay them UBI anymore.
or pre-existing investments on which they can survive.
Then the incentive becomes: manipulate the emulations to sign away the rights to their investments, and then pull the plug.
Not necessarily. I think you're well aware of my concerns about automation-induced unemployment, with most if not all humans becoming economically unproductive. Mind uploads are unlikely to change that.
Yes, and I consider most of them to be poorly made, and unresponsive to the most basic criticisms.
Even small sums held before a Singularity could end up worth a fortune due to how red-hot the demand for capital would be
You can't start your criticism with "there's very little reason to think that reality will pan out that way.", and then say something like this. I do not grant any claims of "the singularity" happening a single shred of legitimacy, unless it comes with solid supporting evidence. I grant even less legitimacy to any claims about what will happen to pre-singularity investments, any such claims are pure fan-fic.
No. Because, in both scenarios, they're obsolete, and little that you can do to make mind uploads cheaper won't apply to normal AI, which already start at an advantage.
(...) Once again, if you have tractors, the market for horse-rustling falls through the bottom.
Then follow the logic of the analogy a bit further. Do we see massive horse farms where we devote insane amounts of resources for the horses amusement? Or are the horses we do keep there for our amusment?
Took a quick look at a few of those it's pretty much what I expected. A lot less "the facts he's basing his case on are objectively false" and a lot more "I don't like his framing". Though to be fair GGS isn't that good about making a facts-based case, and tries to make up for it with storytelling, so... fair enough I guess?
Dude literally picked the only country in the region that didn't have an authoritarian "back"slide at the time.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
"Incentives" are not the be-all and end-all of matters in life.
Sure, but it's unwise to dismiss them.
The police are incentivized to have high levels of crime to justify their salaries. You don't see them running coaching sessions on bank robbery.
Not incentivizing these things is the reason number one for why the police is run as a public service, instead of a private one.
Oncologists have "incentives" to keep you alive and cancer-ridden indefinitely to get that sweet insurance money. I know plenty, and I'm afraid that's not an accurate description of any of them.
Because the patients have power to just not go to the ones that would. Not to mention take revenge.
The kind of organization that would run mind uploads would likely be a cross between all of the above.
None of the pressures faced by any of these organisations would be applied to mind-upload-runners. It's like insisting there's be organizations that will keep lightbulbs on for absolutely no utility of their own.
Do you know why millions of people were kept in chattel slavery throughout history? Because there was a good business argument for it.
I feel like this makes the case against you than for you.
Besides, I'd like you to consider the possibility, however controversial it might sound, that people and systems sometimes do the right thing even when the first-order effects aren't to their "best interests".
Sure. When there is a common idea of what "the right thing" is in society, that people feel very strongly about, they will keep each other in check. It's a bit of an odd argument to make when the common conception of good is falling apart, but in this case specifically, how many people share your ideas of emulations being people?
In that case, I don't see the point of having this discussion at all.
You don't find it odd that the singularity has to be accepted as an article of faith for the discussion to continue?
Yes? The population of horses crashed during the Industrial Revolution, and has only recently recovered, driven almost entirely by recreational demand.
Right, so when emulation's labour will be like horse labour relative to chatGPT, and it will actively cost resources to keep them running, what does that analogy imply about the likely fate of mind-emulations?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Yes, it kind of is. The more the average man’s opinion matters to the ruler, the more likely it is that the country is democratic
Ok, but that means there are absolute monarchies that are "democractic" and liberal democracies that aren't (and the "liberal" qualifier is important, because Botond already implied it's not really a democracy if it's not liberal enough, but your claim would imply the amount of liberalism is irrelevant). I can imagine a coherent view being extracted from this but I think it would boil down to "democracy" == "rule of the majority", but then I don't see how you can claim there's a tradition of democracy in the west.
Isn’t the main alt-right and alt-left anti-democracy argument that people’s opinion don’t matter, it’s all ‘elites’, ‘lobbies’ , hidden and less hidden power-brokers who decide? Even they agree that this average joe pressure is democratic in nature.
I can't speak for everyone, but kinda. It's more that they punch below their weight. And like I said above - I can accept democracy being the will of the majority, but I think it derails the previous arguments more than clarifies them.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
it seems obvious to me why the US would want to be allied with Israel
Far from obvious to me. What would you say they're getting out of it?
As far as I'm concerned, Iran should be treated as a pariah as long as it refuses to behave like a civilized country.
What's so uncivilized about them? I keep hearing complaints of "sponsoring terrorism" but plenty of civilized countries like to play that game.
You laugh, but a) plenty of American (okay, Irish-American) money went into the actual IRA, and b) the US loves sponsoring terrorism, to the point it often ends up fighting the very terrorists it sponsored.
if there’s one tangible Eastern European development that can be called the result of Wilson's deranged fantasies, it’s the creation of Czechoslovakia
You think Germany and Russia gave up so much territory between them, because they were such jolly old chums?
in the case of Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania there was zero democratic tendency after WW1 to slide back from towards authoritarianism.
Pretty sure they all had some parliamentary system that got couped at some point between the wars. Hungary speed-ran it, but they still had it for a brief period after the war. The "zero democratic tendency" thing is my argument, thank you very much.
Agreed except for the last sentence. You're taking token western institutions to pretend there were democratic norms, and (rightfully) dismissing the token Russian ones. Even if you want to carve out Germany as an exception that was somehow actually democratic, deep in their hearts (I can even give you "rule of law" as an institution that they had, to be a good sport), that still does not salvage your argument for why the democratization of the Eastern Block was a success. You even have to invent additional just-so stories to explain the relative "failure" of the democratization of the GDR, even though they it should have been the most successful of all, if "democratic traditions" were so important, and existed in Germany for such a long time.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
The second half of the 20th century. Expansion of the welfare state and government programs are attacked as socialist.
Both sides are to blame here. Socialists were, and still are, marketing their economic system as "let's do what Denmark did".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
There needs to be a documentary series on a major streaming service that, as fairly and calmly as possible, shows what progressive populists believe and what the problems with it are.
First time? Best case scenario is that this documentary series would be dismissed on sight as right-wing propaganda, worst case scenario is that people making it will have their lives ruined.
Politics is war by peaceful means, you don't win by "calmly explaining", and much more straightforward issues, that would cost a lot less to concede than this, have been a decade long slog of an uphill battle, you have no chance moving people on their fundamental beliefs.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
And yet, somehow the state of Russia is explained by a lack of democratic norms.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Yes, and I believe he was, in fact, a Mossad asset, and as handy as he must have been at critical junctures, I'm dubious that Epstein Island had the necessary throughput to shape the long-term trajectory of the US foreign policy.
Also, you kind of have to be careful about blackmailing people en-masse, because if they realize this is what's being done to them, they might coordinate to fight back against you.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
"Adopt local cultural norms"? What else is it supposed to mean?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
Do you think that means they believe Israel is literally twisting the US's arm to do it's bidding, or that they believe the US leadership holds an ideology resulting in their support of Israel even against the interests of Americans?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
7 zillion people do far trashier things every week. Is it because he's rich? We abandoned the whole "leading by example" idea for aristocrats ages ago, and Bezos is no aristocrat.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
As for the "political dynasty" stuff, what makes Trumpism so unique is the cultism
At this point this can only be called projection. Half of his base had their fingers on the trigger in case he listened to the neoccons, and went to war with Iran.
Compare and contrast to refusing to answer basic questions like "what is a woman?" for fear of how the rest of the cult will react.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Not sure how you get from "Bill got a letter in the mail" to reasonable suspicion?
How about "Getting the contact info for Bill's supplier the same way Bill did, ordering some seeds, using that as evidence to raid the supplier, and getting the addresses of his clients"?
in which case "I just like to keep my fruit in a carboy" isn't going to do you any more good than "I thought those were tomato seeds".
the "left some fruit in a cabinet" line was not an example of the legal defense you'd use once busted, it was pointing out how easy it is to make alcohol out of completely legal ingredients.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
Is there anyone disagreeing with this? I'm only familiar with the claim that the US supports for ideological reasons, not that Israel has any leverage over the US.
Estonia? Latvia? Lithuania? Poland? Romania? Bulgaria? Hungary? And yes, contrary to what you said below Germany also counts, of course. I'm almost impressed how you put your finger on the single country in the region that did not revert to authoritarianism, and are acting flabbergasted how I could possibly think they're not representative.
The "democratic tradition", the way the term is being used nowadays, of western Europe is more a result of the Cold War and it's alliance with the USA, than it does with anything that happened before the war. Even Spain and Portugal were dictatorships until the 70's.
Whether or not it would work is another question (and the explanation of why it worked for Asia is another liberal just-so story that they had to scramble for after the fact, as they do with many things), all I'm saying is that it was an idea floated by public intellectuals at the time, although ultimately not attempted.
First of all it's worth reiterating that the "it" is "people voting the wrong way", something that clearly shows the "democratic traditions" are a cruel joke.
As to the causes, I mean, maybe? I could imagine that if the reunification went well the east Germans could be bread-and-circused into complacency, and would be just fine with brilliant ideas like importing seven zillion Syrians and Afghans, putting people in prison for speech, but locking them in a women's cell after they declare themselves a woman, and fining people €10K for misgendering them, but it's not immediately obvious to me. The psyops ran by the Americans on their western counterparts are legendary, to the point that anyone coming from a country with any amount of healthy patriotism comes away shaken after seeing the end result of what they were put through.
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