Corvos
3mo ago
I own a goddamn OLED 4k HDR high refresh rate TV
Which you use as a monitor, right? How are you getting on with that? I nearly copied you but balked at the price.
Granted, but it does seem so to me. I observe that my consciousness exists, and that nobody can tell me how this is so. 'It's just a property of complex systems' seems like a non-answer to me, spoken in a very confident tone of voice, and being entirely too vague to be useful. How do complex systems produce this property? Does it only happen if those patterns are in a meat brain? Are AIs conscious? PCs observing themselves via their antivirus software? Rocks?
It's like Sophism. Yes, we cannot prove that the world exists. But it seems to me that it does. Likewise the assertion that humans beings don't have free will, to which I can only note that for all intents and purposes I seem to. Assertions to the contrary seem essentially to be faith-based to shore up a particular conceptual model and don't really help at all to make sense of the world. Even the people who claim to have become enlightened by discovering that their own ego doesn't exist just act just like everybody else, right down to the sexual harrassment scandals. At least if we discovered that the entirety of human consciousness was powered by fairy farts we might be able to get somewhere new with that.
Corvos
3mo ago
Agreed. Materialism is a prescriptive hypothesis about how the world is that can be disproven without invalidating the empirical process. Indeed, materialism as conceived in the 19th century has taken a certain number of knocks in the last hundred years with the discovery that the universe has a specific start point and that the location and behaviour of particles and waves is fundamentally undeterministic.
Corvos
3mo ago
You are both trying to achieve diametrically opposite things. Clearly, it's not possible for CEOs to be seriously concerned about downside risk so that they are responsible stewards, whilst also making them feel safe and detached enough to comfortably take serious risks.
Neuroscience doesn’t cover qualia. The hard problem is that there is no known mechanism for material reality to interact with or produce subjective thought and experience. To produce specific neural patterns, yes, but not to produce subjective experience.
Lots of materialists attempt to resolve this by saying that neural patterns are subjective experience, but this doesn’t actual solve the problem, it just declares it not to exist. Humans clearly do have subjective experience and we have no idea how that might relate to electricity produced by bags of salty water (cells). The fact that altering the cells changes the subjective experience still doesn’t tell you the mechanism by which one produces the other.
If it turns out that souls and angels and demons are real, then physicists will publish articles constraining the relevant parameters of archangel Gabriel in short order.
I think you are confusing empiricism and materialism. If angels exist then materialism - the idea that physical particles and waves are the only phenomena in the universe - is wrong. You might or might not be able to make empirical predictions about how angels and ‘spiritual matter’ behaves, but that is not materialism or physics. And there is no guarantee that spirit would be amenable to this approach - ‘social science’ has broadly failed because human behaviour at scale is not a phenomenon that yields well to empiricism, being non-consistent over both time and space.
Corvos
3mo ago
If you specify that for this person the maximally moral impulses produce ‘max enjoyment’ ie max hedons, then tautologically not?
Corvos
3mo ago
I've lived on top of a supermarket before. It's not ideal because of all the noise, especially early morning deliveries. Lots of crashing and banging.
Corvos
3mo ago
How do you get smart enough to manufacture thermite and nitro, plus detonators, but not smart enough to realise that you're going to get arrested when you leave them behind to take a piss in front of police officers? Serious question. Is it just that mental illness affects different cognitive capacities differently?
Corvos
3mo ago
Also a 100,000 dollar bill, again for use between major banks only. Private handling of one was illegal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_one-hundred-thousand-dollar_bill
My aunt just used a rolled up newspaper applied to the nose for a mild negative reinforcement, equivalent to the dope slap. But dogs are social animals, they’re as motivated by disapproval as much or more than pain. “BAD DOG” in the right tone of voice is usually all you need, I think.
Corvos
3mo ago
The big issue with processing rare earths is the pollution AFAIK so yes, Europe probably not a great place to start. Though I bet the Poles or somebody would be happy to stick some factories in a less-used area and reap the increased influence and military protection that comes with it.
Corvos
3mo ago
Because modern progressive culture sees that as analogous to praying with an anorexic for them to lose weight, ie abetting self-harm.
Corvos
3mo ago
Hmm. Major questions for me are:
- To what extent is China’s economy now independent on exports? That is, to what extent can China exercise their right to not export items without catastrophic damage to their industries?
- Is the most likely non-Chinese partner for rare earth processing America (I imagine so, Trump will see this as a great way to bring EU in line), Russia via India, or can Europe do this in house?
Corvos
3mo ago
At the risk of being pedantic, we were training dogs for millennia before the shock collar was invented, and also in many countries the shock collar is banned, so it cannot be necessary even if sometimes useful.
I make no comment on the morality, I think that depends on how it’s used.
This raises so many questions. Does Bluesky have a communications team (apparently not)? Why do so many of the Bluesky staff treat their (very queer, very trans, very liberal) userbase with open contempt? Why are they so attached to having bigots on their platform? And does this perhaps indicate that a fair part of the Bluesky staff have fascist sympathies (unclear, but we would do well to assume the worst)?
Gee, I wonder why they don't want their current userbase?
More broadly, I think that there was a time when a) the grey tribe thought that they had more in common with the liberals than they did, and b) thought that queer liberalism was the future and opposing it was just asking for damnatio memoriae. They were therefore inclined to allow/enforce progressive political orthodoxy.
As this arrangement broke down, tech leaders have become increasingly aware that a) they don't have much in common with this faction and b) having a solid bloc of very queer very trans very liberal users makes your userbase incredibly volatile, aggressive and hard to please. See for example:
Furthermore, while I don't believe that most of the tech industry or most "tech people" are outright fascists, reactionary centrism of the debate-bro flavour, or what noted race scientist Scott Siskind calls the "grey tribe", is distressingly common.
The fundamental problem with having a heterodox social media platform is that humans are very tribal and are not psychologically capable of being in genuinely heterodox environments. Even what we have here is, largely, a political monoculture with a strict set of rules and a culture that is (somewhat) orthogonal to red/blue but still very clear. You can talk to someone and think 'yeah, they would make a good Mottizen' and look at a 4channer or blueskydiver and think that they wouldn't. Observations to this effect have been made by many posters here right before they flame out.
EDIT:
I didn't know we had any channies here
Look, okay, some 4channers are all right
I didn't mean that literally no 4channers could be good Mottizens, only that AFAIK the speech norms are often pretty different and a lot of people who enjoy spending time on 4chan kind of enjoy being deliberately provocative, which is banned here.
Corvos
3mo ago
Historically perhaps a dog might be gored by a boar while forced to participate in hunts.
That's kind of the point, though. Dogs weren't forced to participate in hunts. They do it themselves, they love it. Depending on the breed, they were bred to do it almost compulsively. Stopping a dog chasing things is hard, that's why you have to keep them on a leash in the park.
Whereas any dog breeds that are not lapdogs have immense difficulty staying still. According to https://www.akc.org/dog-breeds/mastiff/ a mastiff has middling energy levels i.e. is not a lap dog, and almost certainly finds it very difficult to stay still for lengthy periods.
Corvos
3mo ago
It means 'stateless', i.e. not drawn to have a specific ethnicity.
One reason that Japanese stuff is so popular at the moment is that it's almost completely separate from American politics. The Japanese aren't just not woke, they aren't not-woke. They just draw girls like that because they think it's cute.
Corvos
3mo ago
If you are a Republican voter in Alabama, I don't see how Chicago is "your house" in any morally relevant way. If you are a Reform UK voter in Lower Snoring, I insist that my house in London is not "your house" in any morally relevant way
For the obvious reasons:
- There is free movement within borders. Open borders for one part of the country means open borders for all.
- There is continuity of government within borders. Imported voters in London can and do vote on what people in the oh-so-condescendingly-named Lower Snoring are allowed to do, think and say. They also exert cultural control through more indirect means (quangos, pressure groups and so on).
Are you proposing allowing individual US states / UK counties to have their own legally-enforced borders and government?
peacefully breaking immigration laws is immoral on the level of filesharing or handling salmon suspiciously
This is, of course, the load-bearing item of contention. To me, and to many, peacefully breaking immigration laws is some combination of trespass, home invasion and squatting. If I come to your house, and I eat your food and I tell you I'm never leaving, and the police back me up, it's not really your house any more. If 100 people like me do they same, it's definitely not your house any more. You are vestigial. Maybe there are photos of your family on the dresser - what do those people mean to me and mine? My children's photos will look much better there. Your furniture is ugly and doesn't represent my culture - let's throw it out, sell it, burn it for warmth.* It doesn't matter how peaceful illegal immigrants are, or if they do odd jobs around 'your' (for now) house. Demographic change is demographic change.
That's ignoring the face that lots of illegal immigrants actually turn out to be neither nice, peaceful or helpful, of course. But is it any wonder that voters react badly to breaking immigration law, or helping others break immigration law, when seen from this perspective?
*You might feel that this is catastrophising, or at least very pessimistic. I think that anyone pro-immigration must feel that way, but post-woke I can't agree. The outbreak of statue-vandalism, proposed name changes to get rid of all the old English names on parks and streets (most of which didn't get pushed through because there was no yet enough support), the direct import of specifically American racial grievances post-Floyd, the constant drumbeat of 'X is no longer appropriate for Modern (Multicultural) Britain' moved me heavily on these issues.
Historically, it seems fairly clear that this is what happens: Lebanon, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Jerusalem, the spoils machines in places like New York in the 1930s (which used to be carefully split so that the major political positions were held by one Irishman, one Italian, one Jew and one protestant IIRC) and the black machines in places like Chicago.
From the outside, it looks like America is already heavily focused around ethnic spoils - some of your biggest political debates are about to what extent ethnicity is relevant in job and university applications, the appropriate ethnic composition of universities and good jobs (between whites, Jews, blacks, etc.). Where and how children of different races should be educated, and how they should be treated by the law when they grow up. In more integrated countries these questions simply don't come up.
True, and I apologise for not being around to play something as I said I might be. Work picked up a bit but mostly I’m too lazy even to be properly thoughtfully lazy…
I have my doubts about getting a massive screen because of eye strain. I’m told that if you have a big screen dead in front of you (ie you’re looking straight ahead rather than down a bit) your eyes instinctively try to focus on the horizon and it messes you up long term. I work on this thing most of the day so I want to be careful about that.
https://cluvens.com/scorpion-ergonomic-gaming-chair.html
A friend and I have a pact that when our careers takes off and we become immensely rich we will buy one of these lol
You have exams?
More options
Context Copy link