Corvos
1hr ago
It's just... the world is so beautiful, you know?
Corvos
1hr ago
Corvos
2hr ago
I think there's some of both. Someone was talking last week about how much environmentalism is an aesthetic: happy, multi-coloured people in harmony with nature and each other, living in beautiful garden cities. And that aesthetic is both positive and negative to some degree. Pro-local neighbourhoods has to mean anti-car, pro-clean-air means anti-smoke and therefore anti-factory, anti-wood-fires, anti-gas-hobs etc.
I think @anti-dan is correct in that often the 'anti-' aesthetic comes first, people dislike chaos and capitalism and want central planning, they dislike 'dirty' industry, they dislike racism and nationalism and parocialism and this plays a big role in their willingness to become Greens and to believe the more extreme takes on that side.
As always, I default to Bertrand Russel's method: any deeply held belief requires at least two of [personal desire, +/- social pressure, and preponderance of empirical evidence]. You will believe something if you really like it and the evidence seems to line up that way (HBD, often), or if you like it and your community agrees even though the evidence doesn't really line up that way (most religion inc. mine IMHO as a Christian), or if the evidence lines up that way and there is social consensus (we're probably not going to get lots out of interstellar space races).
Corvos
4hr ago
Your average environmentalist is a middle class college kid with an iPhone. They aren't giving up much of anything except maybe biking more and eating less meat.
The comment I've heard several times from middle class environmentalist friends is, "Of course, people are going to have to stop doing [thing I don't do]". Biking and recycling make them feel that they've made their sacrifices and they can happily start requiring things from other people.
Corvos
5hr ago
I was told by a psychologist that the vast majority of suicidal impulses last minutes or even seconds. The idea is that they don’t have time to seek out a substitute before the impulse wears off. It may appear later in other circs of course.
Corvos
9hr ago
Downvoted and AAQC’d.
You have raped my eyeballs and will be hearing from my lawyers shortly.
Corvos
1d ago
First thought: 'Oh, hey, I can understand this!'
Second thought: 'Oh, Christ, I can understand this.'
Interestingly @RandomRanger cited a video in another thread that's an unintentional example of this. It's an Avatar compilation video titled "Hardest RDA Edit" where 'hard' is used to mean based/awesome/woah. My browser mistranslated that to "[Most Difficult] RDA Edit' i.e. 最も難しい RDA 編集.
If GPT is given both the title and the summary (which Youtube could do internally with their API) it gives the much better translations "Max strength RDA edit" 史上最強RDA編集 or "Most villainous RDA edit" 最凶RDA編集. In general I find GPT much better on language problems than they are on almost any other task, and miles better than standard machine translation.
Corvos
1d ago
今、天国に色気分だわ
@4bpp sorry for double-dipping, but since I've got you here do you know why わ is used? Obviously it's usually feminine, and I understand that the male usage is from the archaic patterns where it's broadly an emphasiser like ぞ and therefore used by archaic / cool characters to express emphasis. Is that what's going on here? It doesn't quite seem to fit.
I didn't spot that tbh. After a decade I still can't quite get all the nuances of how に should be used, especially when it's used as part of more sophisticated/niche grammar structures. N1 is still a little ways off...
I do notice that none of the translations got the nuance of 「キモい！」と反応してくれて right.
Moreover, she said “You’re degenerate!!!” for me.
The use of くれて to imply this was a sort of mutually positive interaction changes the entire tone of the passage, so it's kind of bad GPT misses it. Though I feel like I'm putting far too much thought into the ramblings of a perv on the internet.
Corvos
1d ago
It's as if Kaczynski was using AI agents and hypersonic missiles, starting a VC-backed startup for the cause of destroying technology.
'The Master's tools can absolutely dismantle the Master's house,' said Kaczynski, watching from his penthouse as smoke rose on the horizon. 'With great efficacy.'
Corvos
1d ago
I think he must have tried to iterate on his original translation. The direct translation is more accurate:
Today’s stream was perfect! When I commented, “Step on me, please!” my oshi, Haachama, actually responded with “You’re gross!” And then she even followed up with “You’re way too much of a perv!” It was insane!! I feel like I’m in sexy heaven right now. This is honestly the most peaceful moment of my life.
And the thing I’m most hyped for is Haachama’s birthday live on Sunday, August 10th at 9PM!! I seriously want to support her with everything I’ve got. Just imagining that day feels like I’m drinking her bathwater.
Though I agree with @phailyoor that a lot of self-expression is lost here compared to his original attempted translation.
Corvos
1d ago
Sort of. Broadly, I believe that young people weren’t in serious danger so depriving them of the vaccine for a while was fine. Rather, young people weren’t being deprived per se. Whereas your white guy over 45 was still in some need of a vaccine and depriving them is therefore a problem.
If the disparity was massive enough I imagine I’d bite that bullet and give the vaccines to the young black people first out of obvious necessity.
My understanding is that the disparities weren’t that wide and that in the cultural moment professionals were sort of overjoyed to find a reason to demonstrate their anti-racist credentials by giving black people preference in a matter of life and death. Which obviously affects my perception.
Corvos
1d ago
I'm not saying they are correct, I am saying its a reasonable non evil position to hold.
Ah, apologies.
I personally think that the position’s semi-evilness comes from its reasonableness. It’s a perfectly reasonable chain of thought that ends up denying white people care because they aren’t yet dying in sufficient quantities.
Broadly I would say that the case of old versus young was so stark that it was ok to deprioritise them. And in general one is normally able to avoid such problems by having sufficient manufactured medicine.
But in general when things like this come up, I think that it is best to avoid temptation by not discriminating, to the extent possible.
Corvos
1d ago
Re: Avatar fiction, Semper Victoria is very good, although doesn’t take the transhumanist angle.
Rather, it just extrapolates directly from the end of the first film. The original mission has failed and Earth society is on the verge of ripping itself apart from cascading fuel shortages. So the UN does the only thing it can do: cobble together all the resources they can still access, send one more expedition in a Hail Mary flight across the stars, and promise Parker Selfridge immunity from prosecution if he agrees to act as advisor for the mission.
It’s very well written and the author does a great job of keeping the stakes high and the characters relatable and non-preachy. To quote them:
This is not going to be a "humans show up and curb-stomp the na'vi" kind of story. Nor is it "Humanity is perfect, na'vi aren't". I'm going to show humanity as we are, the good, the bad, the ugly. the noble and the savage, the idealist and the cynical, etc.
Even if you're a huge fan of the Na'vi, I think you can still enjoy my tale. Give it to the first few chapters at least and let me know what you think.
That's one way of putting it, but another way of putting it is that such a distribution is effectively punishing white people for being too healthy.
Essentially, "you're not dying enough, so you can't have a vaccine". The underlying problem that the machete version of the cartoon is trying to point out is that attempting to compensate for different base health by race is in practice going to mean depriving people from healthier groups of care that they would receive in a colour-blind society, until and unless they start dying at an equitable rate.
Corvos
2d ago
A statistically even worse method of birth control. Recommending this is 100% colored by ideological bias.
You are conflating two things:
- Not having sex is a 100% effective way of not having children.
- Telling your kids not to have sex has much lower efficacy, modulo the personality of the kid and the relationship with the parents.
Most of the suggesters likely have confidence in the method (as they should) and in their kids (rightly or wrongly) and therefore suggest this method.
Those girls are damaged and they have already been steeped in a way of life that makes them cynical, mercenary, and not well suited for stable monogamous relationships. I am not even condemning them for it; it's a survival strategy for desperately poor women who have few other options.
I’m afraid I have to second this. I had a friend who married such a girl in another Asian country. He believed that she had retired and that since he was now providing for her she would not be tempted back into old habits that she clearly disliked.
It was not so. The habits of decades don’t fade so easily - she chafed at the lack of power she had as the demure receiver of her husband’s money and returned to prostitution behind his back to fund a secret drug habit and (I suspect) to get back some agency in her life. Then he lost his job and things blew up completely.
One of EA's main tenets is that the traditional hyperfocus on overhead costs of charities is unhelpful as a measure of actual efficacy. If you want smart, driven people to do good work in allocating resources, paying them something like market rate is advisable. Otherwise, you're selecting on something other than merely talent for the job.
Yes, but the problem is that if you are giving them good salaries, you are selecting for the ability to tell good stories to donors in exchange for money. There's a reason why charities have tended to be suspicious of such structures: they have no in-built market correction so they're easy to turn into guilt-tripping sinecures. (GiveWell is fine but it's like a regulatory body and is straightforwardly capturable, so doesn't count.) That's why charities have traditionally relied on a combination of:
- scions of wealth
- wives of wealthy men
- men who've made their money and want to give back to the community (or, cynically, to barter wealth for influence)
Since none of them need money. Of course, this still biases charities towards sounding good rather than doing good, but that's really really hard to avoid.
One negative review begins:
I genuinely can't believe this is a real book.
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