Corvos
6d ago
More than some, less than others, I don’t know. Personally I think that foetuses are pretty human by the end of the second trimester and consider it broadly more appropriate for abortion to stop somewhere around the end of the first trimester.
You asked the more specific question of whether pregnancy can be considered the primary telos of sex from any viewpoint other than a Christian one and I’m just saying that as a biologist it seems very obvious to me and did long before abortion flared up as a public flashpoint (which it mostly still hasn’t in the UK).
Corvos
6d ago
Any biologist? Yes, sex in humans doesn't result in pregnancy literally every time, but it's the regular natural outcome and the prime evolutionary purpose of its existence. It takes considerable contrivance in terms of decades of biochemistry and materials science to prevent regular sex resulting in pregnancy, and sometimes even then sometimes that contrivance fails.
It's like exploring flooded caves or BASE jumping off buildings - it's not meant to go wrong, but everyone knows it sometimes does, and the only reason you're at risk is because you enjoy the activity enough to put aside the possibility of failure. Most people don't want such high risk and consequently don't do those activities.
No, she’s saying, “how far did we fall, that the right to kill your own baby in the womb on demand is considered to be the most important right a woman needs, the main thing that distinguishes women from chattel?”.
You may disagree with the framing, of course. Personally, I am more sympathetic to the pro-abortion side than Here and think the Euros (but not the UK or Anglo countries) have it broadly correct. First 8 weeks or so it’s not really human in any meaningful biological way IMO. After that period is ended the right to abort should, aha, terminate.
In anglo countries we seem to have got into this weird maximalist position where if you can’t kill a baby a month before birth then you are a slave, the baby has no rights until literally the moment it’s squeezed out of the vagina, and the whole thing is celebrated and glorified in a way that is very weird from the outside - a miscarriage is a tragedy but a late stage abortion is a beautiful assertion of the right to one’s body. I get the reasoning but it’s a bit much.
Corvos
8d ago
What I mean is that as a semi-advanced Japanese learner, it sounds like the best way to play is in Japanese where translation quality is not an issue and you have to go by real cultural nuance / in-depth understanding to figure out the answers. It's very rare to find something that is a) not targeted at (beginner) learners, b) not novels and novels worth of text as in an RPG, c) requires specific attention to the language at a level deeper than 'can I work out vaguely what is going on', and d) provides feedback about whether you got it right.
In theory it sounds great for an intermediate to advanced learner. Do you actually get any feedback, or do you have to do all 3000 and pray?
Corvos
8d ago
Now THAT's a Japanese learning game!
Is 'masochism game' a generally used term? It made me think of Viscera Cleanup Detail.
Corvos
8d ago
Nothing, I guess, if they really do have that ability. I would dispute equating "conducting a sneak-assassination of the entire leadership plus an extended bombing campaign, aimed at some combination of overturning the country's government + preventing them from developing weapons that might actually hurt their attackers" with "getting into a scrap". But yes, if India did that and Pakistan succeeded in closing the Strait of Hormuz, I would naturally blame India.
is this the first known instance of Nobel Disease developing in someone who didn't win a Nobel prize?
No, I think this is a different phenomenon. Humans anthropomorphise, and for various reasons LLMs have been made very easy to anthropomorphise. The Turing Test basically gets at what a normal person's definition of 'human' is, and LLMs basically pass it, so as a response people have started splitting into one of a few groups:
- People who interact closely with LLMs on a technical level and see the increasingly small gaps in the models themselves, or see the gaps in the simpler versions of the models and extrapolate up.
- People who interact closely with them on a less-technical level and bond with them.
- People who see something that has many of the qualities who traditionally consider human and ascribe all of the qualities we consider human.
- People who pattern-match to sci-fi narratives about 'robots becoming human', either in a positive way or a negative way.
- 'AI will not replace us, nerds are thieves who make inferior copies of us' people who will never assign intelligence to an AI no matter what.
All of this will only get more complex as discussion about AI continues to feed back into the training data for AI. It was a pretty notion but I'd like to slap the guy who thought SOUL.md was a good place to begin making AI workers.
TL;DR: Dawkins is saying this because he's gone normie, not because he's gone weird.
Corvos
9d ago
The point is that forcing somebody to do something and then blaming them for doing it is petty and sadistic.
If somebody controls an important pass, and you slaughter their family and make it clear that you will continue to slaughter until you get unconditional obedience, then closing off the pass is the obvious and natural response.
Some Americans seem to have got so fed up with being criticised unreasonably that they have lost the capacity to see when they are being criticised reasonably. Others seem to believe that Red Americans (as opposed to the hated Blues) can do no wrong and should be acclaimed throughout the world as the righteous God-Kings they obviously are - or else.
Corvos
9d ago
She also broadly abandoned him once she got rich and powerful, if memory serves.
Corvos
9d ago
People like Nerd Fitness regularly try. The problem with gameification is that games themselves have to be at least a little bit fun, especially if you want people to play them long-term. This is much harder to do for things that are (broadly) inherently dull and painful such as tax returns* or learning theoretical physics than for things like shooting monsters or looting dungeons. See for instance the game made by the guy who just tried to kill Trump - to the extent that it accurately represents and tries to teach particle physics, it's much less fun than another game would be using similar mechanics without the baggage.
There are other issues - gamified approaches have to put aside lots of extra time for the 'game' part so they aren't very efficient. If you have to play a periodic table board game for a week's worth of evenings where you could get the most important bits of info from a slide, a 30 minute lecture and a test, that's not necessarily an improvement.
*yes, I know about the XKCD.
Corvos
10d ago
I mentioned your description of the KV-2 to my Dad the WW2 enthusiast and he suggested you look up the French Char B1 bis at the Battle of Stonne, which took 140 hits defending a chokepoint and destroyed 13 Panzers and 2 anti-tank guns.
Corvos
11d ago
Your Two Minutes Hate quote from Nabokov is great. I've noticed myself that I often prefer the clunkier fan translations of Japanese visual novels to the elegant modern localisations, especially that of Fate Stay Night where the writing is fairly execrable at least in English. Lots of repetition, fragments, and clunky sentences - "People die when they are killed." - but there's an interest to it that gets lost in the polished remake.
Corvos
11d ago
Democrats who could convincingly project moderate positions on these social issues -- that are not assumed to be covers for more extreme positions -- would be popular. This would give Democrats lots of room to push their economic agenda, which is broadly popular. Democrats could have healthcare, tariffs, and infrastructure. This is basically what someone like Josh Shapiro did. A national platform along these lines would probably be very successful. In fact, I think if Democrats had adopted something like this all along they would never have lost to Trump in the first place.
This is basically the Tony Blair approach to government, and indeed it worked gangbusters for 15 years.
AI suggests Familial natural short sleep. It seems to be genuinely pareto-optimal for humans, with basically no known downsides and several performance enhancements, although confounded by small numbers of experimental participants. It's not clear if it's a condition per se or just winning the genetic lottery by falling on the absolute edge of various genetic traits for efficient sleep simultaneously.
AI also suggests that it's entirely separate from MCAD deficiency, which usually produces a low tolerance for exercise and slow physical recovery.
I hope you don't mind my looking it up, but it's a fascinating collection of traits.
Corvos
13d ago
As an outsider, there seems to be this longstanding tension in American thought between, “the president is the tribune of the people and must be kept from harm” and, “the only way to keep the president the tribune of the people is to make sure they can kill him if they want to”.
Corvos
13d ago
Used to happen in British Palestine (Israel) I believe. The Stern Gang loved that sort of thing.
Corvos
13d ago
Traditional Asian architecture is just not a scalable solution when you're quickly trying to urbanise 1/5ths of the world's population.
A great discussion, and keep in mind that this is true in the West as well! Big tower blocks are no more native to my British culture than they are to yours, where beautiful stucco Georgian houses completely fail to scale, as do thatched cottages or the stone of Oxford.
One can draw a lineage from the Swiss to brutalism and from the Americans to skyscrapers, and thus call these things ‘Western’, but I think it would be more accurate to say that Globalism and the pressures of urbanisation swallowed Western cultures first and then Eastern countries very soon after.
Corvos
14d ago
Spunk is a noun not a verb. In the words of a great man:
“You’ve got spunk and balls… and I like that in a woman.”
Corvos
14d ago
The generally proposed etymology is that it derives from a now defunct curse “God’s blood!” which was shortened over time to “‘sblood!” and then became used as an intensifier.
Corvos
15d ago
That’s what’s creepy about it. He’s a perfectly nice, intelligent, self-aware… murderer.
Corvos
15d ago
I don’t like Yud much so it doesn’t really count but I would lay some blame for anti-AI violence at his door. He’s stoked panic and sky-falling doomerism about it for more than a decade, on the basis of no meaningful knowledge or experience whatsoever, not pausing for even a second when his ideas about how AI would materialise (alien optimisers, FOOM) turned out to be completely wrong. He has consistently advocated for maximally violent approaches to preventing AI, objecting to individual efforts only on the grounds of pragmatism.
In fact, I would say he’s one of the worse people to do this kind of thought experiment on.
That may be true for many other fetishes but I've literally never heard any guy express a desire for that kind of play. Every time you hear about it, it's always the girl pushing for it. I think society finds this awkward so it gets blamed on the men.
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