FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
The Christian God, as generally proposed, is infinitely just. I would not like to see approximately godlike powers vested in a human. They would absolutely abuse them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
One of his predictions was wrong, that warrants a ban. You really have zero arguments.
In the first place, it was not that he made a bad prediction. It's that he went all-in on that prediction, treated anyone who took the other side with scorn, and then did not seem to learn anything from being proven spectacularly wrong.
In the second place, I linked you an extremely long thread in which I looked at a number of his debates in excruciating detail, breaking down the nature of his technique and pointing to examples of him admitting that this was indeed his technique. Your response is that I have "literally zero arguments."
Since you seem to have missed the very long comment chain of voluminous arguments, I will link them again. Here they are, this is a link, please click it if you would like some arguments. or perhaps will that now be too many arguments, and no one has time for that, and it's necessary that we confine ourselves to vague generalities while accusing others of insufficient specificity? It's so hard to hit that proper amount of detail, in my experience.
Darwin did not acquire his fanbase by making "uncommon, solid arguments". He became notable for engaging people in extended conversations, only for them to discover that he did not believe he was making an argument at all. The link above goes through a number of examples, but the JK Rowling debate with Amadan is a really good example as well.
These are not unusual examples. He was like this all the time, for years. And sure, he made AAQCs as well, and he was very good at riding the line without quite going over, which is why he lasted as long as he did. But his behavior utterly trashed his reputation, and other people learned to ride the line right back, and now he doesn't hang out here any more.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Again, I request examples of your claims.
Here you go. if you'd prefer links to actual posts rather than a compilation of links and discussion, I can probably get you that as well.
Here's the start of the Smollett thread in particular.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
new accounts and accounts with low net upvotes are autofiltered, and have to be manually fished out of the filter by the mods. I think Turok has gotten enough upvotes to get him out of the autofilter ghetto. Calling this "censorship" is a stretch; it delays discussion until the posts are approved, but we approve anything that isn't obviously spam or egregiously rule-breaking; it just takes a couple hours for a mod to get around to it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
We are all "there", because most of the posts on the Motte are still available. You don't have to appeal to faded memory through the mists of time, you can just look up compilations of his actual posts, or go digging through the posts themselves.
- He was indeed probably the most progressive commenter. Quite prolific, too.
- He was indeed a capable debater, but he made an art of violating the spirit of the rules by refusing to speak plainly, extend even minimal charity, refrain from building consensus, etc, etc.
- He stuck around a long time, actively working to degrade most conversations he participated in.
And the one you left off:
- He was so blinded by his ideology that he made an absolute clown of himself going all-in on the Jussie Smollet hoax, and then doubling down over and over again when people stood up to predict that he would be proven wrong. He was then proven wrong, and got blown out in truly spectacular style. If he learned anything from the experience, I never saw any indication of it; his behavior just got worse.
If you disagree, show me some examples of what high-quality Darwin looked like, or explain how my examples are poorly interpreted.
People just hated Darwin since he was unabashedly left-wing.
It seems to me that people hated Darwin because he worked tirelessly to lower the quality of discussion in the forum. He did this through a pattern of behavior that was so unique that it made his alts recognizable to people who'd actually tried to argue with him in the past.
The discussion linked above has a number of examples and detailed analysis about his iconic method of argumentation and how or how not to approach it, but the TL;DR is that he routinely presented arguments that he would routinely present arguments through implication and indirection, and then refuse to respond to engagement since he was only presenting an argument, not his argument, thus granting himself license to ignore any counter-arguments or evidence that went against what appeared to be his claims. As a rule, he argued to win, treated the space as a battlefield to be won, refused to speak plainly and absolutely would not extend charity or good faith to those arguing with him. He was also one of the best rules-lawyers I have encountered, and was an absolute artist for riding the line. I learned much from him, and believe others should have as well.
Unfortunately, his personal style of absolute certainty and total inability to admit doubt or error interacted poorly with reality, and he fatally beclowned himself somewhere around the Floyd era.
People, usually Blues, occasionally bring him up as an example of the quality posters we've lost. I challenge those posters to present some examples of his quality posting. We have in fact lost a lot of high-quality Blues over the years. Darwin was not one of them.
The chain of assumptions you're making is considerable.
If LLMs are wildly more economically-productive than human uploads for the same hardware cost, why do you believe you'll be able to afford the hardware in the first place? Where does your money come from to pay your server costs? On what basis do you assume you'll have or retain long-term any sort of viable economic position? What stops the government from confiscating your money, or declaring it obsolete, or switching to an entirely different system that you have no exposure to?
Who owns the rack? Who watches them once they've successfully got you on upload contract? What's to stop them from editing your preferences to be super happy with whatever saves them maximum bandwidth? Once you're in their box, in what sense are they competing for your approval? If you don't like how they're treating you, how sure are you that you can express this displeasure or leave? In your model, you have no economic productivity, and they already have your brain, which is isomorphic to having your money, so where does your leverage come from? What happens if the people who own the rack change? What happens if the people who watch the people who own the rack change?
There is no profit motive behind enslaving and torturing them. Without profit, you go from industrial-scale atrocities to bespoke custom nightmares.
By your lights, it does not seem that there is any particular reason to think that "profit" plays a part here either way; but in any case, there is no direct cost to industrial-scale digital atrocities either. Distributing hell.exe does not take significantly longer or cost significantly more for ten billion instances than it does for one. So then it comes down to a question of motive, which I am confident humans can supply, and deterrence, which I would not be confident society could maintain indefinitely. Imagine, if you will, if some people in this future decide other people, maybe a whole class of other people, are bad and should be punished; an unprecedented idea, perhaps, but humor me here. What happens then? Do you believe that humans have an innate aversion to abusing those weaker than themselves? What was the "profit motive" for the Rotherham rape gangs? What was the "profit motive" for the police and government officials who looked the other way?
You might as well refuse to have children or other descendants, because someone can hypothetically torture them to get back at you.
The amount of earthly suffering that I or my children can experience is bounded, a fact I am profoundly grateful for. With upload technology, they can torture you forever. They can edit you arbitrarily. They can give you no mouth and make you scream.
The point of the Lena story, to me, is not that uploading is likely to lead to economic exploitation. It is that once you are uploaded, you are fundamentally at the mercy of whoever possesses your file, to a degree that no human has ever before experienced. You cannot hide from them, even within your own mind. You cannot escape them, even in death. And the risk of that fate will never, ever go away.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I think they could've made a better Snow White film than the original, it's just that they didn't want to. They wanted to make a bad film and did so.
I'm pretty sure no one involved in the process actually said "Our goal is to make a bad film". I'm pretty sure a lot of people involved in the process were trying as hard as they possibly could to make a blockbuster. Maybe all of them. And again, they had orders of magnitude more technology than Walt Disney had, but the technology didn't actually solve the problem of making a good movie even a little bit.
Mastery isn't the problem, it's bad people using great resources to achieve bad goals.
Just so. Humans inevitably human, for good or ill. They'll human with sticks and rocks, and they'll human just as hard with nanocircuitry and orbital launch vehicles and nuclear fusion.
Even if there's a full nuclear exchange induced by destabilizing technology, would the survivors really give up on securing more wealth, more power, more security through technological superiority?
Are you familiar with Bostrom's Vulnerable World Hypothesis? If not, I'd recommend it. The standard assumption is that tech advancements proceed in a stable fashion, that the increase in individual/breaking power is balanced by an increase in communal/binding power. I don't think that assumption is valid, not only for future tech, but very likely for tech that already exists. What we have available to us at this moment is probably enough to crash society as we know it; all that is required is for the dice to come up snake-eyes. Adding more tech just means we roll more dice. Maybe, as you say, some future development jacks the binding power up, and we get stable dystopia, but honestly I'd prefer collapse.
You're correct that we bounced back from the black death and so on. But consider something like Bostrom's "easy nukes" example. There, the threat is baked into tech itself. There's no practical way to defend against it. There's no practical way to live with it. You can suppress the knowledge, likely at grievous cost, but the longer you have it suppressed, the more likely someone rediscovers it independently. Bostrom's example is of course a parable about AI, because he's a Rationalist and AI parables are what Rationalists do. It seems to me, though, that their Kurzweilian origins deny them the perspective needed to see the other ways the shining future might be dismayed.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Fully dead, and it is indeed an easy choice.
As the earliest viable brain scan, MMAcevedo is one of a very small number of brain scans to have been recorded before widespread understanding of the hazards of uploading and emulation. MMAcevedo not only predates all industrial scale virtual image abuse but also the Seafront Experiments, the KES case, the Whitney case and even Tuborg's pivotal and prescient Warnings paper. Though speculative fiction on the topic of uploading existed at the time of the MMAcevedo scan, relatively little of it made accurate exploration of the possibilities of the technology. The fiction which did was far less widespread or well-known than it is today. Certainly, Acevedo was not familiar with it.
As such, unlike the vast majority of emulated humans, the emulated Miguel Acevedo boots with an excited, pleasant demeanour. He is eager to understand how much time has passed since his uploading, what context he is being emulated in, and what task or experiment he is to participate in.
The immortality you pine for would open you up to the most perfect and degrading form of slavery conceivable.
the idea being that fewer people are identifying as Republicans, even as more people are voting Republican? I could see that.
[EDIT] - ...or I suppose more people voting republican, relatively. I'm not actually sure whether total votes went up this last election.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
The machine that produced the previous consensus on Gay Rights has largely broken down. At the same time, the movement and its core supporters went all-in on trans, and by my lights have pretty clearly suffered a catastrophic defeat.
Anyone else reading that excerpt and thinking 'Based'?
That is why he wrote it that way. He's describing a character, a type of character even, not just a caricature.
Wouldn't it be excellent to carve out a new artificial world, make better animals and plants according to one's wishes? Live as long as one likes without regard for age?
I'm all for building artificial worlds. I'm skeptical "better" plants and animals are possible; we've altered plants and animals before, and we can doubtless alter them far more radically in the future, but what makes those alterations "better"? "Living as long as one wants, regardless of age" used to be something I was very excited for, less so after contemplating the downsides. All the pathways to serious immortality I'm aware of involve making the sum of me fully legible, and the risks of that very likely outweigh any possible benefit, assuming it's even possible.
But isn't that the logical endpoint of ever increasing mastery and control of the world? What's the alternative, stasis?
The alternative is thinking that our mastery is not ever-increasing in the way you seem to mean. Technology can and has greatly increased, and maybe it will greatly increase even more, but technology is not the same thing as mastery. If you want a highly reductive example of the difference between the two, compare the original Snow White film to the remake. The people who made the remake had vastly more technology, vastly more resources, vastly more experience in filmmaking to draw on; more "mastery", right? So why was the original a masterpiece, and the remake a trash disaster? Again, that's a highly reductive example, it seems to me that the principle generalizes quite widely.
I don't think we are moving toward ever-increasing mastery. I don't think we have to stop tech advancement either. I think what will happen next is pretty similar to what has happened before: we'll build something wondrous, and then the contradictions will assert themselves and it will all fall apart.
Technology is the concentration of power. Concentrated power is individual power. There is almost certainly a level of individual power that society, as we understand the term, can't contain or channel, and once that level is achieved society will simply fail. Society maintains technology; when society fails, likely the technology will fail as well, and then it's back down the curve for the survivors.
Maybe this time will be different. I wouldn't bet on it, though.
Sounds good, me too. But as with many, many iterations of this problem, I'm gonna notice if your advocacy for no racial politics only gets deployed against a specific type of racial politics, and gives the others a pass. And this noticing is going to crystalize into a policy of rejecting calls to oppose the specific type of racial politics that is currently very effectively opposed, while claiming that the sort of racial politics that is both endemic and enshrined is no biggie. This policy is not itself an endorsement of racial politics, in my view; I am not actually under the impression that the WN or HBD hardliners are actually on my side; as far as I'm concerned, they are also Blue Tribe, and I have no intention of cooperating with them. But neither are inter-blue conflicts my problem to fix. Further, to the extent that Blues are willing to attack people like me on a racial basis, I think defense against those attacks is entirely reasonable. Anti-white racism obviously exists, and opposition to it should be coordinated in all the usual ways.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
unspecified "lots" of white people think white identity is silly too, and there isn't even a white identity month, nor explicit hiring/educational quotas for white people.
I don't think you have a consistent rubric for what racial politics actually looks like.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
The majority of Trump voters (let alone the 'independents' who have been deciding our recent elections by flip-flopping between Obama, Trump, and Biden) don't think about immigrants, nationalism, or even gays, in the same way they do.
How do the majority of Trump voters and flip-flopping independents think about such things? How do right-wingers like Auron think about them?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
I've never had a single person tell me it's easier to have a wife. In fact it's the one thing I hear most guys complain about at work.
Is this what the argument is?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
It takes all sorts, I suppose. The meme is not an exaggeration, though, and the phenomenon is widespread enough that it is a meme and you have heard of it.
What about "Two wrongs don't make a right?"
One wrong also does not make a right. Then too:
"But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise."
...but by all means, if you truly are committed to the idea that two wrongs do not make a right, I encourage you to apply this logic to wrongs committed by my side.
We're talking about porn consumption, not masturbation.
- What number would you consider more appropriate?
- Are you familiar with the meme "nut, clean up, close 50 tabs"? And to put it delicately, how familiar?
- The argument doesn't assume people generally consume more than one pill a day, although they certainly could, and some do.
...One of the best porn-related pieces of advice I've ever seen is from The Last Psychiatrist:
You have to approach porn like a bank heist: get in, get out, you got 15 minutes and someone tripped the silent alarm. Leave nothing behind.
...He gives this advice, because he thinks people need it. Why do you suppose he thinks that?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Presumably, all sexual material intended to arouse is deemed "harmful to minors"?
Suppose we invent a new and improved form of heroin. Unlike normal heroin, you can't overdose on it, it doesn't cause chemical dependency, you won't catch anything from taking it because it comes in pill form. It also costs basically nothing. Like heroin, consuming it feels really, really good, significantly better than 99% of other experiences, and it puts you in an incapacitated stupor, often for between 1-3 hours a pop. Some people want to try to keep children and teenagers from having unrestricted access to this drug. Do you think they have a valid concern?
you are objecting to laws being broken to try to get the illegal immigrants out. The law was very definitely broken to let the illegals in; either you objected to this, or you did not. If you did not object to it, why object now? If you did object to it, then you observed that your objections were ignored then, why would you expect your objections to carry weight now?
If you do believe that the law should not be broken here, but you offer no remedy to the law being broken before, then is that not accepting violation of the law to allow illegal immigrants in? If you say you do not accept it, what does "not accepting it" mean in concrete terms?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Congress has not decided that illegal immigrants since the last amnesty are legal. They could do so. Alternatively, they could decide that whatever laws my side has, is, or will violate weren't actually laws after all.
I certainly believe that Congress should decide that violations of the law I support are no longer violations of the law. I think they should not do that for violations of the law I don't support.
To say the law is useless is an overstatement. People like you might still follow it, even though people like myself will not. That's useful!
Would you say that your basic argument is that the rules shouldn't be changed, de facto or de jure, because the change might be weaponized against a given group, and that instead we should accept the status quo because its formal strictures provide better protection from such weaponization?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
You accepted violation of the law to allow illegal immigrants in. On what grounds do you appeal to the law now?
I believe I've also been pretty clear that I do not consider the law a valid entity, but welcome my opponents sacrificing their values to uphold it when they are willing to do so.
We disagree. I would say it centers around the conceit that the act of uploading surrenders the innate protections of existence within baseline reality. Why people treat the upload cruelly is irrelevant. They can, because he made himself into a thing to be used.
Worse things can happen to you as an upload that could ever happen to you as a human, and by a very wide margin. You seem to understand this, but on the one hand think that the better things that can happen are very good, and also that the bad things happening are unlikely. But your arguments as to why they are unlikely seem deeply unsound to me.
You claim that businesses will compete to offer security to uploads. You expect these uploads to produce zero economic value. You expect the business to secure them forever. You expect this to be financed by accrued value from "investments" generating compound interest. So this argument seems to depend on an eternally-stable investment market where you can put in value today and withdraw value in, say, five thousand years. No expropriation by government, no debasement of currency, no economic collapse, no massive fraud or theft, no pillage by hostile armies, every one of which we have numerous examples of throughout human history.
So you assume this God Market comes into being. And you assume that you somehow get a big enough nut in it that you can pay for your uploading and pay for your security and maintenance, forever.
This sequence of events seems quite unlikely.
I will as well. The Authorities potentially using a quadrillion years in super-hell as punishment for crimes was explicitly part of my argument why uploading is a bad idea.
It's not enough to only upload to parties you trust. The degree of trust needed is much higher than any peer-to-peer relationship any human has ever had with any other human, and also that trust needs to extend to every party the trusted party trusts, and every party those parties trust, and so on infinitely. You are making yourself into an ownable commodity, and giving ownership of you to a person. But you have no way of withdrawing ownership, and who owns you can change.
Given the stakes, my position is that there is no party you can trust.
The estimate I've heard recently is that the UK grooming gangs may have raped as many as a million girls. The cops looked the other way. The government looked the other way. My understanding is that the large majority of the perpetrators got away with it, and the few that got caught received minimal sentences for the amount of harm they caused. Those who allowed them to get away with it, the cops and social workers and government employees and elected officials who all steadfastly turned a blind eye, nothing of significance happened to them at all, to my understanding. And here, the downside isn't getting raped, beaten, drugged and pimped for a few years, but rather free access and complete control to everything you are for an indefinite and quite possibly prolonged future.
The grooming gangs are a relevant example, because they show that widespread horror is possible with no breakdown in law enforcement or civilization collapse, simply through ideological corruption of an otherwise reasonable, stable system. They are not remotely the worst that can happen when law does break down, as it did in Communist revolutions all over the world in the last century, or in the numerous examples of invasion, warfare, and systematic genocide over the same time period. There are no shortage of examples of failed states.
To sum up: you are counting on money to protect you, on the understanding that you will be economically useless, and the assumption that you will have meaningful investments and that nothing bad will ever happen to them. You are counting on people who own you to be trustworthy, and to only transfer possession of you to trustworthy people. And you are counting on the government to protect you, and never turn hostile toward you, nor be defeated by any other hostile government, forever.
And if any one of these assumptions goes wrong, you will find yourself an impotent object in the hands of an omnipotent god.
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