EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
No bio...
User ID: 207
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
5mo ago
English, courtesy of GPT4: https://pastebin.com/UPGRajKA
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
10mo ago
Biological reproduction rates pale in comparison to memetic ones. Ignoring the unfortunate reality that effectively no one has found a policy capable of flipping fertility declines, what use is a Russia of 400 million if 300 million read the New York Times, or at least watch Marvel movies?
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
8mo ago
There are a few places like this which really stuck out to me. At the beginning of Act III, some refugees are squatting in a merchants house, and you come across him asking his guards to clear out the house. The situation is presented as a moral dilemma, which is immediately undermined when you read the merchants mind and find out he's smuggling terrorist bombs into the city, okaying your inevitable slaughter of the guards and the man.
Seems to shirk away from any actual dilemma: if an apparent conflict between the players incentives (XP + GOLD) and morality arises, there's always an out so you can satisfy your desire to be good and still get the cash.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
5mo ago
Since we don't use it to order or hide posts (I think?), I don't think having downvotes hurts too much. What I'd like to see are additional or replacement dimensions. LessWrong added an "Agree/Disagree" vote, which I like, with the original upvotes indicating quality alone. That can make it easier to get the highly upvoted, highly disagreed with posts that are really the ideal.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
6mo ago
Negligible, unless retroactively incorporated into the story of WW3 just because it occurred around the same time.
There aren't any great powers on the side of Hamas, only Iran, and only partially. There are chances it could escalate to a war with Iran, but that would not be a world war.
The reality is: the next world war occurs either because China attacks Taiwan, or Russia invades a NATO country. The latter is... extremely unlikely.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
Yep - there's a reason the "us against the world" meme is unkillable. If Clyde's got Bonnie, he can go without status if need be.
Not to mention the growing contingent of men with neither relationships or status...
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
4mo ago
"Just bow before the golden statue, you don't have to mean it."
On the first level, it's always rational to give in to threats of force when you are uncertain that you can resist, and never more so than when all you have to do is give up some wispy theoretical thing like "sovereignty". Just calculate the probability weighted present value of future benefits and select the decision branch that maximizes it, right?
But game theory is baked into human nature: tit for tat is optimal in some games, but we go even further to ensure deterrence. Break into my house and I'll shoot you; invade some Roman lands and they'll destroy Carthage; blow up a battleship in harbor and America will bend every resource to your complete submission or annihilation.
In repeated games, vengeance is rational, and resistance in the face of impossible odds is logical.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
I'm also quite curious for an uncensored perspective on this. I knew it was bad, but the story below about being site-banned for coloring a pixel in the canvas thing is so far beyond what I knew about it really threw me. I've always pushed back against the ring of Gyges story, but if admins are willing to go that far just because they know no one will ever find out...
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
10mo ago
Remarkable lack of conviction - if you cross the Rubicon, you have to enter Rome. Unless this was prearranged for some inscrutable 15D chess reasons, and probably even then, Putin has to have Prigozhin killed.
Then again, no one said Prigozhin was a genius. Maybe he just doesn't realize the gravity of the situation.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
It feels vaguely alt-right-twitter-fascist to argue aesthetics like this, but come on. Everyone in that illustration is obese, save the two women wearing burkas, and though I personally rather like the way they look, the intention of a burka is to make women less attractive. Both buildings in the background have graffiti, including a delightful short paean to "CLIT" on the front door of the apartment building.
Opinions differ on the aesthetic quality of tattoos and piercings, but if you ask me they can be attractive only in isolation. When everyone in the foreground has a tattoo, piercings, or both, it's hard to argue that looks good.
And, sigh, though I don't personally have a problem with it.... it's worth saying the quiet part out loud: less than a third of the people in that illustration could be mistaken for ethnic Germans. That's a fine vision for America, but in a country where ~90% of citizens have European ancestry, what is that trying to say? What would it say if I put together a poster of my vision for South Africa and 3/4 of the people depicted were white?
But that's exactly my point - they shouldn't and won't. From the perspective of a hypothetical emperor of Russia, if you were to focus on one thing, population numbers are simply not the primary driver of success. You have to convince people that your cause is right. That's not just a post-modern perspective, that's the task of every leader in human history. (In some systems those you have to convince are an aristocracy, in some the wealthy, in others almost everyone, but it always works the same way.)
The Internet and automatic translation simply makes it impossible to be a big fish in a small pond, as your "subjects" will be inculcated in the most effective (read:virulent) ideas that they are exposed to on the web. You either win on that battlefield, or on the physical one. Putin was at least wise enough to recognize that he and his nation weren't up to the memetic battlefield; his mistake was overestimating Russia's ability on the physical plane.
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