ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
Did he actually say that GuessWho is his account, or are people just assuming that?
Yes, he did. On what grounds are you telling people "the only reason they hate him" if you're not familiar with his posting history here at all?
Then we have Gattsuru who did this.
I'll grant you that Gattsuru's antipathy for you is somewhat strange, and for the good of both of you, he should just ignore or block you if he can't. If you think the lack of immediate moderatory action is evidence of some bias, you're wrong. It's standard procedure to be a bit more lenient for quality contributors, this is exactly how Darwin was allowed to post here for years with almost no mod actions against him.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
The fact it keeps happening over and over across many different posters should be sufficient evidence that it's a systemic issue,
I get why it feels like that from the perspective of someone who disagrees with the majority of the forum. People start blurring into a single indescript swarm, and it's all the same to you if it's one guy being and asshole one day, and another guy on another day. But this is madness, and I do not believe that you would ever accept the framework off aggregating assholes by ideology, and deploying moderatory actions adjusted for that, if it was your ideology, or you personally in the line of fire
Right-leaning mods are naturally going to feel that left-leaning posts are far more hostile and delusional than the average right-leaning post, which is probably why a post like Turok's gets banned while something like this gets AAQC'd.
If you're trying to tell me gatsuru is somehow as bad as AlexanderTurok, you're going to have your work cut out for you. For starters, don't you think keeping up with all these court cases required several orders of magnitude more effort than anything Turok has ever done here?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
Sure, here's the JK Rowling debate (starts second post from the top). Surely you're familiar with the Smollet thing? If not then I don't know if you followed the conversation this guy spawned much at all.
Yes. If you think people only hated Darwin because he was unabashedly left-wing, you should consider if you're not doing the inverse. Maybe you only liked him because he was going against the grain (and maybe that's the only reason you like Turok).
If you told me "come one, he's not that bad, you just have an axe to grind against him" about almost anyone else, I could hear you out, but the fact that you think this is a plausible claim about Darwin in particular makes it extremely likely that you're the one that's irrationally biased.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
Yes, I was there too. There's nothing obvious about it. There are plenty of capable debater progressive posters around here that don't get banned. Even Darwin didn't stop posting here due to the ban, he was posting here until fairly recently, and only tapped out after he made dishonest claim, briefly tried pretending he didn't actually make it, and saw people are buying it even less than his excuses for the Jussie Smollet fiasco.
I understand. My point is, every generation has always had this complaint about the one following it.
And my point is that it's not true. It's a thought terminating cliche deployed every time someone points out things are going in a direction that implies that capital "P" Progress is bad. Off the top of my head, one member my family was a big fan of steam trains, and while he did lament the knowledge of how to maintain them is going extinct, it was more about liking to look at the things go "choo choo", he was perfectly aware that diesel and electric trains are taking over, and offer something better. There's also a long line of electrician (and -adjecent) professionals in my family, and while the progress from vacuum tubes to integrated circuits, to transistors, to microprocessors, caused some "I don't know if I can keep up with this" angst, it again did not result in any claims about following generations losing essential skills of maintaining vacuum tubes.
When it comes to ChatGPT, it's important to bear in mind that this technology is very new. We may soon find that having it at our disposal affords us the ability to perform intellectual tasks we couldn't do otherwise, or frees up our time which would otherwise be wasted on time-consuming and labour-intensive tasks.
I'll grant that I can imagine a way to use the technology in a way that's compatible with the growth of humanity. What I'm saying though is that looking at every thing we've done recently developed technologies, this is not the direction we're moving in. We are moving, in a way that is hard for me not to see as deliberate, in a direction of dumbing down, centralization of control, and mass manipulation of society. The point of all these complaints is to stop and think about what the hell we're doing, and averting this.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
Do you have a clear example of this?
"When I said 'people like JK Rowling' I didn't mean JK Rowling"? The Jussie Smollet thing?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
People just hated Darwin since he was unabashedly left-wing.
All your complaints just lost 90% of their credibility with this one sentence.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
Extremely not true. I've had many discussions with MAGA folks here that degenerate to them doing little more than making a series of personal attacks, I report it, and then nothing happens. Making personal attacks against other people here is far worse than vaguely shaking one's fist at broad political movements,
I actually agree with you about personal attacks being worse, even as a singular instance, so I'm willing to agree the mods could've dropped the ball there. It doesn't make what I say untrue, though, let alone "extremely". You'd have to find an example of a specific person being able to do that over over for this argument to work.
Again, I ask as to what exactly was the banworthy part of his post? What specific sentences were the issue that if uttered by right-leaning people ought to similarly catch a warning or a ban in the moderators' eyes?
What are you talking about? Moderation never worked on a "specific sentences get you banned" basis, it was always about whether the post as whole, or even the posting history as a whole, is breaking the rules.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d 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.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
And my argument is that they're not functionally the same. Any right-winger acting like him would be instabanned, he was actually given a lot of leeway.
You're trying to claim that all the instances of different people occasionally being assholes somehow add up, if they come from the same ideological background.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d 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
5d ago
We get stuff posted here of a similar level of snarling, but pointed at the left, and it regularly doesn't catch these types of bans.
If I ask you for examples, are you going to point desperate ones by different posters that happened to get away with it, or ones coming from the same posters in a consistent fashion?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d 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
5d ago
Apes and chimpanzees might scoff at us feeble humans: how we have to cook our food before eating it instead of consuming it raw
Great. Now imagine what happens when we not only become dependant on cooking, but we also lose our ability to cook. That's the issue being raised here. Do you think that's not happening? That it's impossible?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d 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.
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"?
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
5d ago
And yet, somehow the state of Russia is explained by a lack of democratic norms.
Dude literally picked the only country in the region that didn't have an authoritarian "back"slide at the time.
What is this meant to be a reference to please? Czechoslovakia? Because there was no reversion to authoritarianism in that case.
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.
The Asian Tiger route was a str ictly Southeast Asian (Confucian) phenomenon in the specific context of the Cold War and facilitated by generous and targeted American capital investment and the proto version of offshoring. None of that applied to Eastern Europe after 1989.
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.
It was all a long-term consequence of German 'reunification' (the annexation of the former GDR into an unchanged federal state structure) being a complete shitshow which incidentally the Americans played no part in.
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.
The basic idea is that you need intelligent high-agency people to win / get anything done, and so movements should try to appeal to such people rather than alienate them.
I don't even think the basic idea is wrong per-se, but the people putting it forward tend to insist, in a childish Joffrey Baratheoneque way, that they are the Elite Human Capital that needs to be appealed to, and so you must do their bidding, They also seem unaware that even if they were accepted as such, it would come with it's share of duties and responsibilities to their followers. I'd also quibble about the appeal / alienate thing, because the EHCs are very anxious about their status, and can be arm-twisted to do your movement's bidding.
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?
I already gave you one, and again, if you don't know the Smollet thing, you don't know anything about the guy.
And if you didn't interact with him much, then how are you making the claim about "the only reason people hated him"?!
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