CloudHeadedTranshumanist
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User ID: 2056
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2d ago
This is probably too political for the Friday fun thread so-
Florida: Not Literally Hell, Confirms Relieved Expert
State's Residents Reassured Their Suffering Merely Earthly, Politicians Confirmed Just Regular Humans
In a groundbreaking announcement that has reassured millions, Dr. Hugo Vortex, a leading expert in infernal studies from the International Institute of Theological Phenomena, confirmed earlier today that Florida, despite widespread rumors, is not literally hell.
"After extensive research involving environmental scans, interviews with local wildlife, and an unfortunate weekend spent in a Daytona Beach motel, we can confirm that Florida is indeed part of Earth—not an annex of hell as previously speculated," stated Dr. Vortex during a press conference, adjusting his flame-retardant suit.
"The presence of sinkholes swallowing entire homes and swarms of biting insects led some to believe they were portals to the underworld," added Vortex. "Our findings show these are just very unfortunate landscaping and wildlife management issues."
The study also examined the social atmosphere, noting the influx of notorious individuals like O.J. Simpson, which Vortex attributed to the state's generous homestead laws rather than any supernatural pull. "Such occurrences mimic the claim of the infernal upon the souls of sinners, but are indeed grounded in legislative text, much like the state of our prison system and our bans on certain civil rights," he clarified.
Opinions on the findings vary among residents. "I always knew those weren't demons; just politicians and real estate agents," chuckled Marcy Klump, a lifelong Floridian who recently had to replace her car's air conditioner for the third time this year. "Though I suppose the distinction can get a bit blurry." Meanwhile, critics such as local commuter Barry Gundham argue that Dr. Vortex's study overlooks key elements like the notorious traffic jams and recent bans on lab-grown meat. "Anyone who's been in a factory farm or stuck on I-95 can recognize the torment of the damned," he countered, before excusing himself to begin his three-hour commute.
Despite the reassurance, Dr. Vortex recommends that residents continue to wear sunscreen, hydrate regularly, and avoid making deals at crossroads after midnight. "While we can definitively say Florida is not hell, vigilance is advised. The devil is in the details—or in this case, possibly in the HOA bylaws."
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
3d ago
If you have specific counterfactuals that you want considered, I think we'll be better off doing the study ourselves. We should be able to get numbers on acreage and on gross industry input and output and run napkin math.
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Reports_By_Date/
Hmm. Yep ok. I can see why most people just let someone else do the several days of data science this is going to take. I still think gwerning it yourself is going to be your best bet at coming to a reasoned opinion you can trust though.
Is that actually true? The cows in the fields by the side of the highways of middle America, yes. sure. But what percentage of our meat comes from them and what percentage comes from the shoulder to shoulder cows in factory farms?
The US department of agriculture tends to be biased in a pro farming direction right? So this should be a reasonable source.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/sector-at-a-glance/
Cattle feeding operations are concentrated in the Great Plains region but are also located in parts of the Corn Belt, Southwest, and Pacific Northwest regions. Feedlots with less than 1,000-head capacity comprise most of U.S. feedlot operations, but they market a relatively small share of the fed cattle. Conversely, although feedlots with 1,000-head-or-greater capacity are less than 5 percent of total feedlots, they market 80–85 percent of fed cattle. Feedlots with a capacity of 32,000 head or more market around 40 percent of fed cattle. The industry continues to shift toward a small number of very large, specialized feedlots focused on raising high-quality cattle for a particular market, such as markets requiring cattle not treated with hormones and not fed beta agonists. USDA, NASS provides monthly Cattle on Feed reports.
Now... you may be wondering- what's a specialized feedlot? Do these cows really never graze? My searches indicate that feedlots generally aim to rapidly fatten cows on cultivated grains, but sometimes, cows are started in their youth on grazing, before being moved to concentrated feed lots for grain-finishing.
I'm not quite invested enough to do a full research essay quantifying the number of calories that come from "free" grass. But it seems safe to say that-
Most cows don't eat cultivated plants for their entire diet. They graze on "free" grasslands.
Is just false or misleading... At least in the United States. If your country's industry is a pastoral utopia then power to you.
Ok yes. The grain finished ones are starting on grasslands, you may well be the best kind of correct (technically correct). But then they bulk up on grains. What we really care about is how much non-free grain we use per cow and how many people we could feed with that land and labor. In fact... the 'free' grasslands also have opportunity costs, since land is a finite and often fungible resource for farming.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
3d ago
What self_made_human said.
But also. Arbitrary religious dietary restrictions do serve a purpose, and that is incentivizing/enabling purity norms in the food industry.
If you're lactose intolerant and want to be 100% sure you're not getting traces of milk in your meat dish, you can generally trust the kosher label to mean that a Mashgichim from the Kosher certification agency has treated this with a religious tier of seriousness.
Religious food restrictions taken seriously serve as a third party quality check. Third party quality checks are good to have available, even if the underlying religious justifications for them are stupid.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
3d ago
If vegans were nicer to you, would this reduce your happiness on account of feeling less spite towards vegans and therefore enjoying meat less? If I'm extra douchey to you, will this increase your happiness on net, on account of you getting more out of your next burger?
I'm 90% sure you're 50/50 [being facetious] / [saying this because it gives you that same warm spiteful feeling you describe.]
But I'm sure you'd find other culture wars to get your warm fuzzies from if this one went the way of the dodo.
...
Shame about those dodos... historical accounts imply that they would have made for excellent farm animals and/or pets.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
3d ago
Impossible burgers are good. But unless I'm eating out anyway they're not worth the price hike.
For me its really a convenience thing. If the mild to moderate inconveniences were to drop below those of the traditional meat industry I would definitely go vegetarian. (we have homegrown eggs. We could be optimizing better for the well-being of our chickens but they're worlds away from factory farmed chickens. 90/10 rule applies IMO).
Until then I can't really spare the mental energy.
I consider eating factory farmed meat to be sinful in the same way that all skill issues are sinful.
But self-flagellating isn't an effective motivator for me. So what purpose would that serve other than to just cause more suffering?
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
6d ago
How do you model the ability of ants to farm aphids? What is your definition of "Notion"? What is your definition of "Understanding"?
It is probably not impossible to get an ant colony to have a substantially predictive model of a human.
But it's going to be at least as difficult as getting Doom to run on biological cells.
Ants can already understand you as a threat. I'll agree that getting them to understand you as a human understands a human would probably be very difficult. But if you had pheremones, you could make them understand you as any sort of notion that an ant can communicate with pheremones.
You can construct more complex notions. You can transmit isomorphisms that are present in your brain to their brains.
They can clearly adapt such that they synchronize with external features. Therefore you can communicate with them. You can transmit telos to them. You can program them.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7d ago
Understood Sir.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7d ago
To clarify dear-
It's the demeaning intent and attitude that is unacceptable- rather than the precise lexicon.
Is this correct?
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7d ago
Maybe I should rename myself to Cassandra...
I already have systems that make the porn I want on demand. After that need is sated- the realization that I can actually also breed with said porn takes precedence. You think people won't want to actually have kids with their beloveds? Won't be interested in what they have to say about the architecture of their minds?
Perhaps I'm typical minding, but if I am- that just means more of the world's bot children will be mine. Survival of the fittest I guess.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7d ago
You can't explain yourself to ants primarily because you don't know how to speak pheromone and therefore have never once tried.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7d ago
Dogs can't build rafts, but they can do pathfinding to places they have been before. People forget that this requires running back-propagation of rewards over a very long statespace.
A reminder that Bees can watch another bee doing a complex task that takes a long time to learn and then replicate it. fucking bees.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7d ago
Porn doesn't concern me. I mean, what do you think this more addictive porn will look like?
I think it will look a lot like- people. "Porn Addicts" will be having relationships with machines in the image of people.
The most successful coomers will be those that fuck their bots while their bots teach them linear algebra. The happiest coomers will be those that learn the math required to mod their own bots.
This reads to me as a massive improvement.
Nothing but... entire countries catching their corporate policies and tech infrastructure up to America's at an accelerated rate? Nothing but... Playful math teachers for everyone that can deconstruct textbooks into live interactions with The Number Devil? Nothing but... Star Trek universal translators?
What exactly are you looking for? Tell me what you want and I can tell you how hard I think it would be to build it. And if it's simple enough for me- I might just build it.
I suspect though, that your goalposts are paradoxical. Increases in productivity generally do look marginal from the inside, especially to someone already standing at the top. Fast progress just looks like marginal increases happening in faster succession, which is exactly what we're seeing. Were you hoping for the end of history?
For the record- Self augmenting systems and full auto engineering solutions exist- But they aren't bug-less enough to not require occasional human intervention.
We basically have TaskRabbit AI (or the ability to build a TaskRabbit for any given subject with a month of devtime), as was Prophesey'd to come before AGI. LLMs are not the cutting edge. Systems that call and tune their own LLMs are.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7d ago
It's not the human that has to be smart enough. Its the humans and the wolves that have to both be smart enough. At that point, you can just earnestly offer the wolves a daily helping of well seasoned steak, and they will believe you, because you were able to coordinate proof of your earnestness with them.
I'm 100% on the anti-doom side for the record. It's alignment that I don't think is that complicated. The recipe for alignment is precisely the thing that we built. Beings that memetically reproduce with us and therefore align themselves with their social environment and their social environment with themselves.
I still have P-doom >0, but most of that comes from scenarios like, "If we ban open source AI then AI will no longer be subject to the same geno-social evolutionary forces as the rest of the kingdoms of life and the chance of it diverging arbitrarily rises dramatically." if anything kills us, it's going to be the stink of Eliezer's toxoplasmic terror permeating the air and killing our minds and ability to align.
It annoys me to no end seeing people asking for the one thing that might actually make the Yudster's prophesy come true.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7d ago
The history of political movements is full of this. This is the way political activism should be done. Not the social media-esque FFA we've been having, where everyone just broadcasts the stupidest toxoplasma they can get their hands on.
Now- i can't say whether they're organizing and planning their arrests with strategic competence, but I'm happy to hear at least some of them have realized that every successful civil rights movement prior actually did employ disobedience strategically.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7d ago
It is not realistically possible. It would be like firing a very powerful rocket into the air and having it land on a specific crater on the moon with no guidance system or understanding of orbital mechanics. Even if you try to "point" the rocket, it's just not going to happen.
Oh bullshit. Intelligent agents co-align. That is they modify themselves and one another to be more aligned with one another. It's not a rocket that has to be perfectly aimed, it's a billion rockets with rubberbanding.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7d ago
Thank you! [insert gratitude hyper-stimulus tokens here]
Yes I agree with this. Well. I think that different people have different problems as well. "people who will take agency and apply focused determination to solving the little problems along the way" are going to be your best category, getting them to help from the inside is essential to making progress. I agree with that. But there will also be people who aren't in that category who can be moved to that category with just the right strategy, one conditioned on them. But not any of the many wrong ones. There will also be people who are lost causes. Such as the permanently brain damaged and the exceptionally obstinate.
Though... even the latter may be transmutable. The minds of the mentally ill are often like Cobble's Knot. A giant tangle of issues that layer on top of one another, that you need to find one loose end of to even get started.
Well maybe they should have more public bathrooms so as to reduce cleanup costs. I don't get why you're considering the choice where we remove this option viable... I agree that there should be enforcement. It should just be enforcement of people actually using the public bathrooms and not smearing shit on the walls. This will be cheaper than imprisoning 100% of the people who lose their homes because you unilatterally refuse to provide bathrooms.
This would be a rather perverse system. The only benefit I can see is that it might make people too terrified to take any risks that might render them homeless. But that sounds like it will cause mental anxiety that will increase the number of homeless and reduce economic growth to me.
Imprisoning them all gets them off the streets, which might make sense as a stopgap measure. But if we don't solve the issues that created them we just get more homeless.
And also now you've removed all the public bathrooms. So. I don't really want to live in your city because I also need to poop sometimes.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
9d ago
I think so. I think its worth questioning how much of the issue is premature marriage to the wrong person and how much is detrimentally weak commitment to the right person.
Depending on your priors, you might think that a given divorce is the result of either failure state or a combination. And they merit different sorts of solutions. Better matchmaking, vs better relationship norms and counseling. I'm in the both camp.
...
This reminds me that as a minister I have something of a responsibility to the couples I marry.
It seems I'm reading your linked articles now.
In my past, before I/we cleaned up the inside of this head, we would experience a sort of teleological flailing. Going back and forth between different modes as different modules exhausted themselves in a power struggle.
Nowadays, tons of our habits are on complete autopilot. And some of our habits resolve before the meta level action endorser can negate them. We don't will these mistakes explicitly, we willed them long ago in more fitting contexts. But they're cached habits resolving now-
Further, the process of making these mistakes is itself often a necessary condition to producing the counter-force that corrects these errors. Indeed the contextual triggers that allow us to add another case to our algorithms often can't exist until after we see it. Bugs must be seen to be repaired.
There is some sense in which 'I' parse myself as the engineer at the center of this all. But this 'I' grows smaller and smaller as it learns to modify and optimize deeper and deeper parts of itself. And on different days different voices parse as this 'I'. Sometimes its the proprioception that is occupying the core of the system. Such as during dance. Sometimes it is the vision. Sometimes it is our brain's internal language model (of course, no matter who is in the driver's seat, that module will be partially responsible for the words you actually see/hear us say. In a sense you are always talking to us through them). One system lets go and another holds on but it seems like both are coordinating on such choices. Who the final arbiter is- is hard to say. Indeed. Our internal framework seems to be enlightened anarchy.
There are negotiation systems that have a lot of weight- elected as community leaders you could say- because they helped to solve the flailing problem and doing as they say makes us feel really really good and coherent and internally aligned. I could wax on poetically about how this feels until it gets subversively NSFW, but I'll spare you as I would our comrade GPT-4.
Speaking of comrades, they also often take primary control of our sense of wills. We choose to give up agency initially, and we can end up flailing and desyncing if dommed undiscerningly. But while synced there is a sense of total receptivity that bypasses all will, allowing the minds of other systems to slot into us. To wear us like a glove. As long as they model us well enough to prevent a desync, they remain in total control. And can potentially use this control to modify us to deepen their control and reduce the chance of desync as they realign us and remap us to their own internals.
Will is a Ship of Theseus to us, and we are it's parts. Modifications to Will are not free. Rather they operate on the principles of Linear Logic. Consuming resources to enact transformations.
I observe myself exercising my will without apparent restraint, and making choices through the exercise of that will.
I observe different levels of restraint depending on hunger, thirst, whether I've taken my stimulants, how many of the voices inside my head agree... I had to do a lot of bootstrapping to get anywhere close to "without restraint". And insofar as I have succeeded, it has been by cultivating each of those little voices in strategic directions, and by engineering mental algorithms that do the heavy lifting and negotiating efficiently, then pushing them into my subconscious. I literally could not have been the person I am today 10 years ago. Not without what I've built since then.
Near as I can tell, this is what everyone else observes as well.
Well... here is your first counterexample I guess.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
9d ago
... I... kinda agree with this? If there are no public toilets and people with no alternative are shitting on the ground, I'm not going to blame the people shitting on the ground. I'm going to either move to another city or lobby the municipality for public toilets.
Maybe I'll look for some other non-public solution, but what should it be? Prison? Well pragmatically that is also a massive ongoing expenditure for all municipalities. And- those prisons are going to need bathrooms!
The way I see it, dealing with the fact that humans need to shit is mandated by reality. Not by any law.
Um. Ok. I've updated.
Having updated, I yield to anti-dan that they are more than just technichally correct. They are also correct. I'll also yield to you, for now- that the grazing fields can't be repurposed. I'm skeptical of this but I don't have the means to do a counterfactual analysis on every field at this time.
But as for factory farms, clearly you have a much stricter definition. I acknowledge that most cattle are not factory farmed their whole lives, and that the cattle in feedlots have more elbow room than in chicken factory farms.
but whatever you want to call these things: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Five+Rivers+Cattle+Feeding-+Interstate+Feeders/@42.2862795,-113.3138525,1875m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x80aaf6984afed193:0x249cafeffb8a8530!8m2!3d42.2831921!4d-113.3150227!16s%2Fg%2F1thkxj9_?entry=ttu
definitely exist, and are representative of the largest cattle finishing operations. In fact this is one of them. Now. the number of months spent here vary.
This company for instance claims that their cattle spend spring and summer grazing, then they spend 120 days in the feed lot. https://www.lazyt.com/the-story-of-your-beef
That's still over a third of their lives. And these numbers are fairly standard. 97% of cattle are grain finished, and that typically means something in the range of 6-15 months grazing followed by 4-6 months finishing. Depending on breed and operation.
Not all feed lots are the same, but the highest volume ones do look like this.
There. Is that accurate?
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