DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
7mo ago
The «[if we did it,] he had it coming» attitude is already almost as bad as if Indian state involvement gets confirmed.
I don't predict but weakly suspect that in 10 odd years Western progressives (if they still exist and aren't distracted by the extreme escalation of conflict with China, of course) will think about the Indophilic rhetoric with «fellow/largest/ democracy|«biggest/youngest English-speaking nation|Superpower by 20XX» etc with the same disdain they now express for that kind of stuff applied to Israel or (relative obscurity aside) Turkey or Azerbaijan. The vegetarian smiles of fast-talking wonks will become associated with repulsive alien menace as much as inarticulate, idiomatic Chinese saber-rattling is today. Charisma, managerial acumen and geopolitical alignment are important but can only go so far when there's a billion-strong and swelling mass of dimwitted hubris beneath, bolstered by a populist regime.
India is not Western, not liberal, not a democracy, and not on the track to become more of any of those things (unlike, say, Ukraine, flawed though it is). I don't judge. Were I more friendly to Indians, I probably should have.
Sorry can't hear you over the sound of my heuristic working as always: as I said, «with regard to wrongthink».
Your crypto heroes are made of cardboard. Find people with backbone next time: technical chops are merely luck of the genetic draw.
In the meantime I'll be reading my homie wjhbr.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
This is hardly a one-off-- there was a nearly identical incident with an NBA player
? Some entertainment workers deleting tweets and so on under CCP's pressure suggests that it's plausible that the world's richest man may turn his company into an asset of a foreign propaganda?
The degree to which Americans accept their untouchability and superiority over the Chinese as the norm, and flinch when this assumption is punctured, is just astounding and unsettling. This NBA story would be a nothingburger, if not for the implicit «wait, those yellow monkeys got an Imperial Citizen to bend the knee?» gasp. (Notably, much greater and more thin-skinned crackdown from locally powerful parties, e.g. team ADL unbanking Kanye West, is received meekly and with nuanced understanding, or kowtowing approval).
I have not bothered to dredge up further examples, but seems like there's a lot of them
Nah, that's pretty much it, a few cases of low-level hysterics.
from incidents where China has exerted leverage in the past the response from American politicians has not generally been anything more than worried hand-wringing
Meanwhile, some fake news in Bloomberg have become a pretext to wholly eradicate China's premier corporation, and there isn't even a pretext claimed for the current round of sanctions devastating advanced sectors of Chinese economy. All this is accepted matter-of-factly by the entirety of the political class and general population, as the Empire's natural entitlement.
It's okay to approve of this, but please stop the underdog act.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
then the German “deep state” (if you will)
German deep state is a phone line to Washington on hot dial. These things take generations of sovereignty to build, to grow, you need not so much 140 IQ intelligence officers but 80 year old national intelligentsia with unblemished reputation. Neither Germany nor Russia or Ukraine have anything like an American deep state. Those are shallow nations of confused linear workers.
Moreover, if Germans are all that smart, they can understand their place and the future of Russia.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
If not Trump, then who?
That's a terrible line of thought. «If not Putin then who?!» for 20 years straight is how Russia got into this mess. Authoritarians like to exploit the sense of existential anxiety, the limbic, system-1 dread: it makes the electorate desperate to hold tight to the closest semi-viable thing they can feel, let it even be a straw; and then the aspiring Führer's only remaining task is to always be close. It's not a hard one too. The second part of Putin's formula is «never swap horses while crossing the stream». The stream never ends.
Trump's no Putin or Xi or Erdogan or even Orban, but he's certainly circling the same attractor.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
7mo ago
...Like, what's your actual conception of how this is all going to roll out? Putin is couped by the competent, democratic statesmen who form his opposition and then Russia reforms into a functional capitalist democracy, thereby nullifying the threat of their considerable nuclear arsenal? Is that the road you're looking for?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
8mo ago
At this point it seems like the experiment has failed, though. There just doesn’t seem to be the sort of rich discussions here that used to happen
I think the root problem is the nature of the domain, not the nature of the place.
What is there left to discuss?
Bona fide right-wingers, to be honest, have been subsumed by Trumpism (or worse, Pitinism simping), and summarily discredited – in the eyes of most everyone else; their inveterate support of an abject, morally bankrupt failure is just no longer interesting to challenge (I wonder how @ymeskhout still bothers). Stuff like anti-HBD is likewise discredited in the eyes of anyone who could be interested to engage in good faith. (I suppose the inverse has never been credible to staunch opponents). Further inferences have been ruled out either by administrative fiat or just by disinterest in achieving more than proving to oneself that the other side sucks. The SSC-era culture war has died down somewhat. The ongoing culture wars, tracing the important tectonic shifts within the [American] Logos in its intellectual dimensions, calling to non-jaded vision of a change, are substantially different; but the extant population of posters is set in their ways and will mostly try to shoehorn them into the old topics. Should I war with Hlynka again about whether the recognition of LLM intelligence makes me akin to a wordcel Berkeley Marxist who's blind to the truth of Christian God? Pls no. I have things to write on the important stuff directly, without justifying it to a yet another opinionated committee, and I do so now elsewhere.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
10mo ago
Race cannot be gamed (except for edge cases). The whole point of race is its inherence. Any legible meritocratic evaluation immigrants can and will game, Goodharting the hell out of it and wrecking themselves in the process.
even just English proficiency might suffice.
Why is having had British colonial masters a marker of cultural compatibility?
Furthermore, I don't think it's so hard to do some cursory test for cultural compatibility that again, would be much better than the weak proxy of race.
Cursory, adj: hasty and therefore not thorough or detailed
Why "cursory"? Because you want it to be gameable? Because you actually want it to test your merits – namely, opportunism and ability to manipulate bureaucracies to your benefit? See, this is exactly whom people who are arguing for racial criteria would like to not let in.
That said, I think racial profiling is indeed unfair if it goes beyond defining vague priors. It's desirable to filter immigrants for their comprehensive human capital.
It's just… Suppose you were not allowed into the world's richest country on grounds of your character, which was found wanting not through stereotyping you based on race, but through, de facto, systematic measurement and determination of your similarity to your predominant racial type and dissimilarity from natives.
Of course, this can be couched (and even understood by practitioners) in entirely non-racial terminology, like Harvard does – they would just have a holistic psychometric definition of a desirable immigrant, derived, say, from anonymous surveys of natives' evaluation of character and assimilation success.
Would you be willing to recognize this as a fair choice, or would you support work to undermine it as covertly racist?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
11mo ago
The hell does any of that mean? Let's go step by step:
Why would Trump supporters care
Does it look like he's talking to Trump supporters even to express contempt?
what Hanania thinks when he's expressed nothing but contempt
Because arguments are to be considered on their merits, for one thing, and there is demonstrably some merit to DeSantis but zero merit to Trump as a political representative? Because this attitude makes you extremely vulnerable to trivial manipulations?
By the same logic, why should I care what you think of me?
What logic exactly?
And why would I care whether you care or not? Scratch that, what even is this inane macho train of thought about caring or not caring, this one-upmanship? Hanania talks of Trumpists from a zoological perspective; I am using you as a reference point. You are demanding gestures of unconditional respect for your position as advance payment for deigning to engage at all. But this precludes the possibility of any conscious change on your part, thus makes debating you a waste of time.
Still. Let me elucidate my opinion: the point is not to convince you of anything. The point is to convince those on the margins of the Red Tribe that your kind is a lost cause, that you are completely impossible to rescue from your self-satisfied vulgarity, your boomer Facebook group Qanon fetishes, your perverse addiction to throwing tantrums and toothless LARPing.
Hanania probably does believe that, hypothetically, you may be enticed by an alpha male chimp who physically assaults Trump, or by some other bait. This is all peripheral. At the core of that piece is Hanania's desire to have smarter Republicans – not just RINOs, but every Republican with more brains and greater self-restraint than an average Chechen teenager has – join him in losing compassion for you, for their own family and culture, and plot for disenfranchising you from here on out. It is a long-term agenda that is meant to outlive Trump as a political figure, regardless of how well he does in 2024.
Seeing as there has been strictly zero worrying progress lately to change the calculus (no, LLMs being smarter than naysayers expected is not worrying progress), I take it as evidence for Yuddites stressing out an old man and not much else. Sad of course.
That said, Hinton has always been aware of AI being potentially harmful, due to applications by military and authoritarians, but also directly. He knows that humans can be harmful, and he very deliberately worked to create a system similar to the human brain.
I think one difference between LeCun, Sutskever, Hinton (or even competent alignment/safety researchers like Christiano) and Yuddites is that when the former group says «there's X% risk of AI doom» they don't mean that every viable approach contains an X% share of events that unpredictably trigger doom; they seem rather enthusiastic and optimistic about certain directions. Meanwhile doomers mostly discuss this in the handwavy language of «capabilities versus alignment» and other armchair philosophy loosely inspired by sci-fi. Yud, whose X is ≈1, analogizes AI research to «monkeys rushing to grab a poison banana» because he thinks that creating AGI is equivalent to making a semi-random draw from the vast space of all possible minds, which are mostly not interested in making us happy. Compare to Hinton the other day:
Caterpillars extract nutrients which are then converted into butterflies. People have extracted billions of nuggets of understanding and GPT-4 is humanity's butterfly.
Butterflies produce new and slightly improved caterpillars.
Reinforcement Learning by Human Feedback is just parenting for a supernaturally precocious child.
– which is the same imagery Sutskever uses, imagery that the Yuddite Shapira mockingly rejects as naive wishful thinking.
To me it's obvious they don't feel like LLMs are «alien» or «shoggoty» at all, don't interpret gradient descent methods like it's blindly drawing a random optimizer genie from some Platonic space, and that their idea of Doom is just completely different.
It sure would be nice if Metz, who supposedly is good at drilling into technical questions, got to the bottom of what Hinton believes about specifics of risks.
But Metz has an agenda, same as Yud, Shapira, Ezra Klein and other folks currently cooperating on spreading this FUD. It's very similar to committees against nuclear power of the 20th century – down to the demographics, and neuroses, and ruthless assault on institutional actors.
Consequences of their efforts, I think, will be far worse.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
I think you misunderstand the «Socratic method», but you're welcome to keep going. (BTW, is the typo in your flair intentional?)
OP was using obtuse languge to say something they were afraid to say in plain language. In plain language I asked them to clarify.
Your success at this would be logically inconsistent with the premise of my being afraid to speak plainly. Now, how about you speak plainly, without bald assertions in the style of
sounds more like mien kamph than rationalist
But the implication that they push, and it's right there, is that some white nationalism is in order. That's what I wanted them to more articulately express so no one can misunderstand.
and self-congratulatory vague bullshit like
My self confidence about your trajectory is confirmed by this very comment.
I really don't need to say anything. You have said what I wanted you to say.
I was well aware of what they were saying. I wanted them to say it plainly so they couldn't hide what they really felt behind flowery, obtuse pseudo intellectual languge.
You appeal to forum rules and culture. There's a norm here against darkly hinting and insinuating, and also against building consensus. If you believe your conclusions are so self-evident that none could misunderstand, you clearly can afford to spell them out while you're at it. Running victory laps high on your own supply is pretty cringe.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
@Amadan is moderating you for tone, not content. Please let's not get into the «but this particular idiot is such an idiot I deserve lenience for my tone» once again. Sure, bureaucracy is not without its pitfalls, but legible and respected laws are valuable. Normalizing ad hominems at such fringes is only the first step to the collapse of decency across the board.
You can easily express your distaste and condemnation for his entire attitude without setting yourself up by using a direct insult.
Moreover he's clearly not an idiot in terms of raw intellect. This really isn't the problem here.
Even if everything you're saying is true, a) Russian actions are obscenely beyond the pale which excuses anything that can be plausibly framed as counterattack, and b) Americans have won cultural victory, so economic elites of those European states are of no consequence against their own populace (and media elites).
The game is played masterfully, I can't really even object to the sentence. Europeans are in no position to compromise with the plainly irrational Kremlin, and they're in no position to sustain their economy, and they can't blame anyone but themselves, same as Russians.
On the other hand, I can call out Europeans who are still pretending that this is fine. The EU will survive, but it will fall rather far behind without cheap energy, in the crucial period where everyone has to maintain a stake in high-tech economy. The entire fucking continent is going to become irrelevant.
A translation from a biased pro-Russian souce. It's not very insightful, catastrophizes the situation and frames it as an unprovable conspiracy but, I think, is directionally correct with regards to the consequences:
Chronicles of the Death of the EU.
Carthage delenda est.
The real U.S. goals in Ukraine are the destruction of Europe and its economic leader: Germany.
Why?
So let's describe the global situation at the beginning of 2022 (I note right away that the numbers are imprecise, go to MMI and @Spydell_finance for accuracy, but the approximate numbers do not distort either the layout itself or the conclusions):
China. GDP: 16.9 trillion USD. Industrial sector ≈30.5% or 5.1 trillion USD. Export economy 15.3% with an export sophistication rate [here and below actually economic complexity, Export Complexity is another measure but correlated] of 1.35 (easily replaceable, not technologically intensive, but produced at scale, elastic prices, requires small producer margins and inexpensive labor, as well as agglomeration of producers).
Germany. GDP 4.2 trillion USD. Industrial sector ≈27-30% or 1.1-1.3 trillion USD. Export-heavy economy of 35% with almost the highest sophistication on the planet of 2.07 (only Japan is above with 2.49. That is, exports are not replaceable, technologically complex, and therefore VERY MARGINAL).
EU as a whole. GDP 17 trillion USD (suddenly !!! more than China, or at least equal). Industrial sector ~25% or 4.1 trillion USD. (suddenly a little less than China).
Except this industry, as written above, is high-tech, and therefore marginal, giving rapid positive capital growth.
U.S.. GDP of 22.9 trillion USD. But the industrial sector is only 18% or 4.1 trillion USD. (Suddenly less than China and the same as the EU)!!! And the financial sector is over 20%, as is the total services sector at 77% of the economy.
But even this industrial sector, giving only 7.7% of exports, has ECI of only 1.57 (so, like China).
Now, if we look to the beginning of the year, the accumulated imbalances in QE are accelerating inflation and could bury the entire dollar system [lol no].
Stopping QE and the start of the Fed's balance sheet reduction guarantees the decline of the service sector, the de facto death of the financial sector, as well as much of the venture capital IT that's zombie companies with negative turnover margins or no cache-flow.
In order to survive, the States need to urgently develop the real economy, i.e. industry.
However, since the world has gone global, no new markets are expected, the system cannot take over Mars with the Martians, which means it must grow in the intensive mode, which means negative capital work, since the total venture capital investment on intensives does not pay off, this has been obvious since 2009.
So what to do?
We have to kill the competition.
Option 1: China.
However, first of all China is a subject, secondly the economy of China and the U.S. are [still] too connected, and thirdly, the development of industry similar to the Chinese means low margin, long payback period and a drop in personal income. And the drop in personal income means revolution in the U.S. This is not an option.
Option 2: EU.
It fits perfectly, no subjectivity and high-margin business.
But the business is high-margin because it is very technological, that is, it has a high and long threshold for entry. It takes decades of development, thousands of patents, and cultivating a team of specialists.
But the patents, specialists and companies do not belong to the EU.
We need to force these companies to move to the US in their entirety, just as, for example, low-margin manufacturing moved to China in the 90s.
To do this, you have to create unbearable conditions for business: war, hunger and cold.
Now look at the EU!
News 1:
Germany's industrial production fell 1.8% in the first 8 months of 2022 amid sanctions against Russia, and Germany's chemical-pharmaceutical sector (high dependence on gas) saw a 10.7% decline.
News 2:
The Wall Street Journal on Sept. 21 published a story about big German businesses relocating en masse to the New World.
News 3:
Explosion on the North Stream 1 and 2 branches.
I connect the last news story into the same single chain of events.
Carthage (the EU) must be destroyed. At any cost.
This is the main goal of the U.S. in Ukraine.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Do you not suspect that this lip service to the idea of freedom is only paid as long as there's a credible risk of you and others like you effectively or literally defecting to the far group, should the trust be thoroughly betrayed? And that, as soon as there is nowhere to defect to, the hegemony secured forever – the show's over, your carrot is taken away and into the meat grinder you go?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
It feels like the government wants to make sure kids have enough to eat
Of course not. Americans are free to elect pro wrestlers or turn their libraries into sleeping quarters for the homeless, but the stated purpose of the library is still providing access to books. And feeding children isn't the point of education. Education is, i.e. ensuring at the minimum that children learn basic skills needed to navigate the broader society (like, literally read signs, understand arithmetic, handle elementary instructions, speak the common tongue – do things only a foreign premodern peasant thrown into the middle of Manhattan won't be able to). This is a very low bar and, if the NYT is to be trusted (which I guess they can be, here – authors seem to be sincerely distressed with the kneecapped condition of their kin), it is not reached, leaving kids helpless and forced to depend on the unaccountable and overbearing religious community.
So the outrage is legitimate: this is defrauding the state.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
but there aren't any Feynmans in the 21st century
This is cope, of course. Our Feynmans are called names like «Ilya Sutskever» and «Noam Shazeer», or if you want a Gentile, «Alec Radford». The focus of frontier research has shifted from bits to bytes and from public institutions to for-profit companies, while professional celebs have picked up the slack of mental representation for heroic figures. But sci-fi valorization of flashy fundamental physics results, partially driven by military agendas of the XX century and purely aesthetic raygun gothic midwittery, persists; and so people try to explain the non-real phenomenon of our era lacking Feynmans.
Imagine knowing a great guy, he's really very swell, a scholar and an athlete, helps everyone in need; a bit neurotic and guilt-ridden though, and drinks more than a bit. Adorably, he's mad in love and talks of his wife often. You get invited to the 20th anniversary of their marriage, and for the first time see her; she's less than what one might think he deserves. Pudgy and high-strung, adorned with weird new age artifacts, woke, visibly obsessive and controlling, and once he starts musing aloud about some high-minded fancy, she pinches him quite viciously. They withdraw; you happen to overhear her berating him in a shrill voice, and even hitting him with a frying pan, Acme-style. Then in the open, bloodied a little – «I just stumbled!» – he gives a speech where he tearfully attributes all peaks he has achieved and all the good he's ever done to her. She's fuming, but accepts it as a given, and snorts that he should focus more on charity and less on greatness: she still has work to do; if only he could neuter his pride and listen more, and perhaps donate all that they owe to her guru, publicly committing now.
How would you feel about his confession?
You may assume I'm talking about, say, Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner or my own family or whatever, but my point is that sunk cost fallacy is a thing, and that people can have false consciousness. People grow invested in their partners and ideologies, especially if they can't sever the relationship; and religions in particular are partners of civilizations that are so molded by selection pressure as to consume the logos of the people under their yoke; to teach those people to construe their virtues as following from religious practices and precepts, and their vices as failures to comply. In an attempt to avoid incoherence, Christian scholarship interprets non-Christian civilizations too as created by their religions, and holds that any major social form is downstream of some founding creed (with «good» creeds of successful forms tending to be Christian in their ultimate origin). This is generalized transubstantiation, and it should be suspect for any unbiased observer.
It's a chicken and egg question: did the Church build the West, or did the West create Christianity that can be taken seriously? Hlynka's motivated reasoning is as good an example as any, he deeply wants to tie what he likes about the West (actually just Red-Tribe USA) to Christianity, and it doesn't matter for him how accurately he gets the details (just as it doesn't matter for him whether everything he loathes, from progressivism to HBD bros, is truly part of the same bundle); what is clearly Christian of all these proceedings is, perhaps, only Hlynka's obsessive thinking in absolutes and morally laden dualities.
Liberalism and the concept of natural, individual and human rights - inventions of Western civilization - have their clear origins in Christianity theology - we are all made in the image of God, and everyone is a sinner.
Do they?
One of the most misunderstood parts of Genesis, I believe, is Jacob's wrestling with God. ISV 32:28 «“Your name won’t be Jacob anymore,” the man replied, “but Israel, because you exerted yourself against both God and men, and you’ve emerged victorious.”». I happen to like the inaccurate Russian Synodal translation more. «И сказал: отныне имя тебе будет не Иаков, а Израиль, ибо ты боролся с Богом, и человеков одолевать будешь». «And said: henceforth your name will be not Jacob but Israel, for you have wrestled with God, and will be overcoming humans too».
It's undeniable that Christianity has influenced the West. And people can grow tough through wrestling with their faith. But the interesting aspect of such supposedly academic inquiry by theists is that they never ever assume the root of their success lies in some compensation for the trauma, or in ugly aspects of said faith: it's only ever the most noble interpretation of its words, applied directly.
I fear this is unprincipled charity.
Galkovsky on Rome and Christianity:
There are three features of Christianity that catch the eye of any open-minded observer.
The first is the gloomy, depressive nature and fixation on the subject of death and the deceased. The basic religious ritual of Christians is a funeral; funerals are the crowning glory of the Christian saint, and his life itself is the PREPARATION OF THE CORPSE. [...]
Of course the motives of death and barbaric veneration of corpses are subdued in churches before the congregation. For example, relics are often kept «under wraps» - in closed boxes. But Christianity as a whole imparts on the culture an incredible longing and sadness. This finds expression in everything – in architecture, painting, music. Sometimes it turns out solemn and even bittersweet – because tears can bring relief and can be an expression not of physical pain, but of nostalgia, of love, of high sorrow. […]
Secondly, Christianity is a very short and narrow religion. The entire content of the Christian legend amounts to one medium-sized ancient myth. They try to conceal this by turning the Bible into a telephone book or by supplementing it with stories about the saints. But these additions are artificial, uninteresting, and even as such they already create great problems for the basic legend. In general, no one knows them. The Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary in the «Ineffabilis Deus of 1854» is the bureaucratic apotheosis of such «improvements». It is not artistic creativity, but rectification of paperwork by an office of cadaver accounting in a morgue or city cemetery. Take just one minor myth of ancient religion: the myth of the radiant Eos.
Eos is a beautiful girl with pink fingers. Every morning she ascends to heaven in a chariot drawn by Lampos and Phaeton and illuminates the Earth. Eos is a very naughty girl, so her cheeks always blush after the night. When Eos's kingdom comes in the morning, men get erections. Eos is kind, but forgetful. She fell in love with the beautiful young man Tithonus and married him, asking Zeus to make him immortal. But she forgot to ask to keep him young, and Tithonus eventually turned into an old man. In order not to see him, Eos locked Tithonus up in a separate room, from where he complained in a squeaky voice about his unhappy fate. Then, out of pity, Eos turned Dmitri Evgenievich into a cricket.
It's just ONE little story, and this story alone creates a massive opportunity for successful human contacts. It's AMUSING. You can joke about it, you can innuendo, you can relate – to teenagers, to young people, to mature people, to old people. You can laugh, and if you want you can cry too. In moderation, without cruelty.
Now, what can a Christian tell? Well... An attendant came home from the morgue, decided to entertain his wife with a cool story.
– So the old fart got rolled in on Friday, he had been lying at home for two days already. Okay, we put him in the freezer, and on the weekend the power went out. And what do you think, on Monday I opened it, and he's as good as new! Only the toenail fell off.
A normal person is shocked. And the Christian goes on:
– So I brought the toenail with me. Wanna see?
This is… HARD. Very.
The only plausible upside to all this is that Christian culture is quickly causing the secularization of society. People avoid talking about religious topics in everyday life, they stop using religious analogies, and they avoid contact with cult servants. It is no coincidence that it is bad luck to meet a priest in the street. A lot of icons in the house is bad luck. A vacuum quickly forms around a person who is preoccupied with religion. People scatter. The religious community and the state strive to substitute the sacred functions of priests with institutions for moral preaching, statistical accounting, medical and social assistance, art and philosophy – anything but Christianity itself. «Anything but the toenail».
This is why atheism originated and gained the significance of a coherent doctrine only in the Christian world. Other cultures just don't get it, can's see the problem. Imagine an uncle who runs around school plays and combats the belief in Santa Claus. He shouts from the audience: «Don't believe it, kids, it's all a lie!» or he writes a complaint to the Local Education Authority. Or even pounces on poor Santa Claus with his fists and tears up the gift bag. In general, he acts like a complete fool and a retard. But if Santa Claus is furtively showing the children a dried cat from his bag, then we can empathize with the strange man.
Third, there is a ridiculous confusion in the basic doctrine of Christianity that discourages neophytes. […] Christian theologians are literally lost between three pines with their doctrine of Trinity. How this is possible is completely incomprehensible. This creates enormous difficulties for initial propaganda. No other world religion is so difficult for neophytes to grasp. With great effort, the European empires in the 19th century converted a pristine Africa to Christianity at a power ratio of 1000:1. And what? Now Islam is successfully supplanting Christianity there. […] While the Muslim doctrine is very clear. One god is Allah. His prophet is Mohammed. And there are two witnesses for conversion into Islam. PERIOD. A person can be converted in one day and that conversion is honest and strong. […]
In fact, it is unclear how a religion with such a defective doctrine could have spread quantitatively. Chain reaction is difficult in Christianity. This religion conducts effective propaganda only when it already has political and military dominance and is funded by the state.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
On account of you committing to the bit and some posters being supportive of it – though in a welcome twist, fewer than in 2021 on the orange site – I'll treat this copypasta as a sincere criticism of atheism from a Christian perspective.
Hi, a (qualified) atheist here. I have pondered such arguments and have deemed them, although problematic for atheism, insufficiently good to accept religion or really even the agnostic ambiguity about any religion being possibly true. This post by @aaa sums up all of the following nicely so you can skip it.
consider the idea that methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory… just a category error
I am fed up with both sides of this argument for the exact reason you point at: smug, blind faith that their parochial assumptions are universal truths, and that blind spots of the opponent validate their specific assumptions. But it's bold to insinuate that the faithless are the worst offenders here – or more «relativist».
On one hand: yes, absolutely, we are not owed a Universe which is no more complex (in personally consequential ways, even!) than our tools allow us to discern. This unwillingness to see past the edge of the Occam's razor has irritated me to no end in the New Atheism era, and I've written and translated a bunch of stuff on it, and on the relation of metaphysics and religion. (People unfavorably compare my writing to ChatGPT lately; I'll link to some old posts to check if there's been any degradation).
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On metaphysical interest as the pinnacle of human exploration drive.
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«agents can plausibly force metaphycics to comply with contractual ethic beneficial for them»
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Dugin on the American Logos: «Utilitarianism (for example, Jeremiah Bentham) is loathed by the right and the left alike, because according to it the criterion of truth is usefulness, and the meaning of life is the search for pleasure. It is disgusting and humiliating not only for a man, but even for an animal… But … American philosophy is pragmatism… how can one live in such a world that is completely open from both sides? The only criterion is: "it works" [in English]. It works and it works great. This is the basis of pragmatic ontology. It doesn't matter who we are, it doesn't matter what kind of world is around us: what matters is the success of the interaction of these two arbitrary sets - conventionally "internal" and conventionally "external". It works ergo sum et ergo est. … It is not just retardation, it is retardation raised into metaphysics, retardation which, by the way, liberates.»
In short: the refusal to entertain non-plainly-materialist metaphysics even as hypotheses does look like either a cognitive deficit – or perhaps rational irrationality, the choice to not ask certain questions so as to not lose your grounding.
But on the other hand. What you are doing here is what I've seen many smart theists attempt to do. You try to turn the objectifying, diagnostic lens that atheists have used on your team back onto them, but you commit a similar category error, so it flops, again; and your rhetorical judo would've been equally stilted had you written it from scratch. If atheists mistake methodology for metaphysics, you mistake metaphysics for theology – moreover, your own brand of theology. Is proving that Occam's Razor cannot dispel non-empirical beliefs equivalent to proving Trinity, transubstantiation, resurrection and propitiation? No, it doesn't follow. Endorsing a particular faith is a much more self-serving sleight of hand than the mistake of atheists; so ceterius paribus it is worse. You can read the convo here for some more arguments. As I've said back then: «At this point I just think theists have a short-circuited higher-agency-detection system». A cognitive deficit, just a different one.
And finally, crudely, for Christians there is the problem of Jews. Jews, like Adam Conover, ruin everything – by being okay; so okay it causes Christians to revise their doctrine now. Jewish wretchedness, homelessness and seeming abandonment of their tribe by God have been underpinnings of Christian rhetorics for millennia (over which your psyches have been shaped by Church-specific pressures). Today, when someone like Randy smugly says that a polity can't have nice things – a functioning society, basically – without God (and this ostensibly proves the truth of his faith), he also says «without Christ». But it seems you can have much nicer things if you assume that Christ is boiling in excrement in Hell. Israeli economy is booming, as is their population, as is their ability to secure their future; while Christians are dying out and secularizing, Jews grow more Orthodox and «trad»; and they'll become tradder yet in your lifetime. Could you give any single compelling reason for an Orthodox Jew to convert? If not, why would you expect anyone else to be swayed by your denomination specifically?
And curiously, this tradness is not really dependent on wacky metaphysics. Adorno in «The Authoritarian Personality» has said that one reason Jews and Judaism are so hated by the oppressors is their freedom from superficial delusion: «Happiness without power, wages without work, a home without frontiers, religion without myth». I suppose this is a bit too flattering, but it is at the very least possible for them. It is not quite possible for you. Orthopraxic religions are only tangentially connected to metaphysics; yours is pretty wholly metaphysical, it's a matter of belief. And this focus on impractical beliefs, frankly, is a much bigger cause to suspect mental illness. In you and me both.
…In the end it's an issue of constitutional difference, I think: brains of theists are literally wired so as to tolerate implausibility of religion, while my brain is wired to tolerate _senselessness_of the observable world_».
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Another interesting thing about this all is that gender is evidently a fundamental ontological category in the progressive worldview. In the same sense that the immanentized progressive egregore thinks killing black people is worse than saying the N-word, it also thinks that belonging to a gender is more enduring, significant and definitional than being a human/Gear/intelligent beast/vampire/spiritual entity/ascended demon/robot/AI/shadow clone/hivemind/talking sword/whatever. You can move through several of those transient categories, but Gender is the stable inner Gnostic truth revealed to the soul, the underpinning of the self – as discussed by @IGI-111 and others.
Regarding Testament mentioned downthread:
Arc System Works marketing rep Riku Ozawa has stated that Testament is specifically agender (無性, musei?), neither male nor female, and that the character was previously portrayed as androgynous/bigender (両性, ryōsei?), but that the team chose to change that in the new game.[38][39] Both musei and ryōsei are categories of X-gender, the Japanese equivalent of the word 'non-binary'.
In an interview, Daisuke Ishiwatari reportedly said that "They're androgynous. In fact, they've transcended human existence. Just like me."[39][40]
Baka creator! Can't have that transhumanist crap in our not-Christian fighting game about posthuman beings. Every character should pick a flag, a hormone stack, and a side that could be conceivably covered by the selection of bathrooms in an American school.
…Androgyny is, within certain diagnostic methods at least, not some queer notion made obsolete by the modern gender theory, but the psychological opposite of agenderism, or perhaps simply orthogonal as far as nomenclature goes.
In psychology, androgyny refers to individuals with strong personality traits associated with both sexes, combining toughness and gentleness, assertiveness and nurturing behaviour, as called for by the situation. Androgynous individuals are more likely to engage in cross-sexual behaviour than those who maintain traditional sex roles. The rise of feminism and the influence of the women’s rights movement made certain aspects of androgynous behaviour more socially attractive than in the past. Androgynous figures occurred frequently in Greek mythology, often embodying a blend of desirable male and female characteristics. The blind seer Tiresias, a figure of great wisdom, was sometimes depicted as a hermaphrodite.
Laaame. Who cares about attractive sides and personality traits? Tells us your pronouns and what kind of sterilization you need.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Off topic, but I want to say that this post, unlike your direct comments on the issue, made me feel sorta bad about getting a rise out of people who in my opinion have made themselves fair game with bad faith rhetoric.
You're fully correct on the object level here. There's no case against @ymeskhout that wouldn't apply equally well or much better to an unreasonable proportion of discourse in the community. If people don't want to read detailed legal commentary of Trump being {bad, again}, they can just collapse the thread (highly recommended). If they take it upon themselves to correct people being wrong/mean about their favorite politician, but find the process too onerous, they may be advised to reconsider their priorities. Elevating this to mods via reporting is just lame.
@Dean's responses, for all their characteristic argumentative quality, don't amount in substance to anything more than "I don't like it when people make a hobby of criticizing Trump here, so I'll try to shoehorn my opposition to this practice into the well-recognized failure mode of moderation tolerating incorrigible high-effort provocateurs". His own litigative tactic here is more Julius-like, if anything. Actual failings of ymeskhout that are brought forth as evidence of the Julius pattern range from trivial (editing in and out some catty remarks), to highly contestable, to apparently disingenuous (everything about failures to engage with criticism in previous rounds).
The meta level of all this, i.e. the evaporative cooling thesis and long-term consequences of flogging some dead horse, is more interesting but vague and rather hopeless for obvious reasons, and not rigorously argued, not yet at least.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
This is sensible, but so is «rationalists should win», and you know which camp the bulk of those rationalists ended up in (neither yours, nor the winning one, except for half-hearted ones). Inasmuch as conflict theorists act rationally to succeed in their respective conflicts, they are just game theorists. Conflict theory is a somewhat more extreme mindset with stronger priors regarding specific interactions.
Also, it's a frame invented by Scott, who has an innate love of manipulating narratives.
Thanks for understanding my point, in any case.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
I disagree with your interpretation of your Foundation. The entire point of this place is to have a «working discussion ground», that's the first item on the agenda and the value of diversity is contingent on satisfying this criterion.
Some beliefs can be genuinely irreconcilable with that, for example any sincerely held and practiced belief in the utility of shitting up the discussion for most of the people here. Some beliefs are just so epistemologically alien and uncharitable that they don't lend themselves to a productive discussion. Some are plain dumb.
We must not become an echo chamber, but it is perfectly expected that some beliefs, even expressed with formal respect to our tone standards, are in fact not conductive to having a working discussion ground, and the community would be wise to reject them and their adherents precisely to protect its value and purpose. It may be the case that the standard issue Twitter/nu-Reddit militant wokism is grounded in beliefs of this kind.
Ideally, it would be a small sector of the left-wing spectrum, tucked between some dissident post-trotskyism and 4th wave anarcho-feminism. Philosophically, that's roughly what it is. Demographically, it happens to be a big deal.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
29d ago
I counter with the Susan Inequality Principle.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
My compass is fine, they are the same camp. I do not care about their political differences because legacy politics is less important than policy regarding AI.
On one hand, this is a nothingburger. On the other, I might be sheltered but it does surprise me when people in positions of seniority, especially Europeans, reveal such base, zoological prejudice, grounded more in axiomatic disgust than in any moral outrage about population replacement, decay of trust, death of the national Logos or whatever. This was striking in older Germans complaining about Turks – they didn't actually have some abstract case for preserving the racial composition of the Faterland, a sense in which it deserves to exist as a separate project of humanity *; they straight up hated how these foreign people look, smell, move, laugh and decorate their dwellings, on some reptilian brain level. It became much clearer how this nation could take so well to Himmler's gibberish.
But this attitude, unpopular within the ranks of elite human capital, probably explains political woes of the far right somewhat. (And Europeans on average are still much less susceptible to zoological racism than the rest of humanity, WEIRD and all that).
Of course, this is also what is most resistant to indoctrination. Ideological ethno-nationalism is somewhat complex and fragile, it can be discredited and memory-holed through institutional means. Just 'ate 'em can survive with juvenile shitposting alone.
* Of course, people needn't consciously reflect on themselves as members of any such project to carry on its intent, especially if we take the HBD angle seriously. Say, the «project» defended by The Finns would be just their compatriots being maximally Finns. I am partial to project and proposition nations, though.
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