FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
This post breaks a whole bunch of rules. You've had a couple warnings and temp-bans last year, but it's been a while and you got an AAQC recently. On the other hand, you pretty clearly know that this sort of foaming-at-the-mouth rant doesn't fly here. You are waging the culture war, not discussing it.
Take a couple days off, cool down, and come back with something other than tribal rage to contribute.
Free Speech is a spook, an incoherent concept that collapses the very instant it drifts outside the bounds of a rigidly-coherent values environment. To the extent that it has significant meaning, it has never been tried, and to the extent that it has been tried, it has had no significant meaning.
That being said, I see no actual value gained from taking these scalps. Let me speak plainly: I am confident that somewhere between a large plurality and an outright majority of Blues are sad that the assassin missed. If I'm correct in that assessment, it seems to me that the reality of modal Blue opinion is orders of magnitude more important than any aesthetic "norm" secured by enforcing a taboo on celebration of lethal political violence. Canceling people over their personal endorsement of political murder is not actually going to change the modal Blue opinion; all it does is help Blue Tribe as a whole hide the reality of that modal opinion, by coaching them through the entirely inconsequential and pointlessly pro forma rituals of "norms." Speech is information. Blue Tribe is leaking information, and the net result of these cancelation efforts is to help them stem the leakage. I would vastly prefer for people to speak and be heard honestly, so that we can more clearly see where we stand.
That being said, if we're going to do the comparison game, it would be better to be specific about the objects of comparison. I remember a working-class hispanic nobody getting fired for making the OK sign. Is that a good comparison to this? If not, which specific cancelation would be a better one? I remember a lot of people being cancelled for speaking or yelling the N-word in public; I also remember those people not actually getting a defense from the right. Would cases like that be a better comparison?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3mo ago
Conservatives are now pushing for random passport/citizenship spot checks as you’re walking down the street, that’s what “freedom” and america means to you?
Do you believe that Conservatism is a live political force? Do you believe America is a live political entity? The Constitution? In what meaningful sense would any of these be true?
I think you perhaps should consider taking a few steps back and reassessing the realities of the present situation.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
If the rule you followed led you to here, of what use was the rule?
I recall reading about awake brain surgery experiments where interacting with certain parts of the brain produced phenomena in the consciousness, as reported by the person having their brain prodded with electrodes. That seems like a straightforward case of pointing to gears and doing gear things with them.
We already know that our minds and wills interact with the material world. You can make me experience pain by poking me with a pin, or deaden the pain with morphine. You can make me feel euphoria by putting me on a roller coaster. You can make me stop completely by damaging my brain.
Think about it in computer terms: I/O is not Read/Write; naïvely, mouse and webcam drivers are not alone sufficient to work with CPU and RAM. Empirical demonstration of the brain equivalent of Read/Write would be mind reading or mind control. If this were even weakly possible, the world around us would look very, very different than it does. You can induce subjective experiences by zapping the brain. You cannot predict behavior to any significant degree by reading the brain, and you cannot control behavior to any significant degree by manipulating the brain's matter directly.
If you take a soldering iron to your PC's CPU and RAM, you won't be able to do anything useful either, yet we do know PCs are material and, barring the occasional bit-flip by radiation, deterministic/mechanistic.
We know this because we can, in fact, point to the gears in CPUs and RAM and do gear things with them, and this is in fact the best, most efficient way to manipulate and interact with them. This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed. There is no mind-equivalent of a programming language, a compiler, a BIOS, a chip die, etc. Maybe those things will exist in the future, and alternatively, maybe Jesus Christ will appear in the sky tomorrow to judge the quick and the dead. All we can say, from a strict materialistic perspective, is that all attempts to demonstrate the deterministic nature of the human mind have failed, and history shows a clear pattern of Determinism of the Gaps, where accumulating evidence forces empirical claims to steadily retreat into unfalsifiability.
[EDIT] - It should go without saying that none of the above supports a claim that Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Odinism, the Imperial Cult, Shinto, Buddhism or any other non-materialistic system of belief has a better claim to truth than Materialism. We have no proof that Determinism is true; we also have no proof that it is false. People are free to choose their beliefs accordingly. My disagreement is exclusively with those who insist that their system is empirically supported, when in fact the opposite is true.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
You don't really have read/write access to your harddrive either, unless you open it up and look with a microscope.
But you can in fact open it up and look at it with a microscope. Moreover, you can make a new one from scratch with tools, and make it to your exact specifications. You cannot open the mind and look at it with a microscope, and you cannot make a new mind to-spec with tools.
The "direct" access you get as a normal user is just a very reliable introspective report.
And this is distinct from the access you have working in the hard drive factory. But there is no hard drive factory for minds; the normal user access is all the access any of us have ever observed or confirmed empirically.
Thats because the computer is designed to be understandable and manipulable.
The computer is matter. Matter was not "designed" to be understandable and manipulable. It is understandable and manipulable, and so complex arrangements of matter that we intentionally construct with tools generally retain this property. To the extent they lose this property, it is generally because multiplicative complexity accelerates their mechanics from within our grasp to outside it, and we can generally simplify that complexity to make them graspable again. In the same way, we construct LLMs from mechanical components, and to the extent that they lose the predictable and controllable mechanistic nature, it is through the multiplication of complexity to an intractable degree.
We do not construct human minds from mechanical components, and we cannot identify mechanical components within them; we can neither point to nor manipulate the gears themselves. Minds might well may be both mechanical and intractably complex, but the intractable complexity prevents the mechanical nature from being demonstrated or interacted with empirically. Hard Determinism is a viable axiom, but not an empirical fact. The problem is that people do not appear to understand the difference.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Then what are prayers for?
They are for building a relationship with God. The relationship is built on gratitude and trust; gratitude for the many good things he provides for us, and trust that he will care for and preserve us, to a limited but significant extent in this life, and to the maximal extent in the next.
Is my accusation of “God as Therapist” more or less accurate here?
Only to the extent that Therapy is, in its essence, a relationship, but perhaps that's close enough from your perspective.
Yes, but I think that one of the “axioms” on which you’re operating — the one people call “faith” — is that none of the potential arguments which could potentially prove fatal to your continued adherence to Christianity can possibly be true. Such arguments are necessarily false, because your religion is necessarily true. Therefore everything else is an argument backwards from that — a series of post-hoc epicycles designed to lessen the impact of various arguments which seem to reveal contradictions within the doctrines and claims of your religion.
That's one way to frame it, sure. It's also an isolated demand for rigor.
It is routinely argued here that humans are deterministic machines. All forms of this argument that resulted in falsifiable predictions resulted in those predictions being consistently falsified over more than a century of dedicated testing across the globe, and the current popular form of the argument is very clearly unfalsifiable. Likewise for bedrock Materialist claims about the Material being all that exists: by their own standards, it is very clear that things definitely exist that we cannot observe or interact with even in principle; to the extent that we can in principle observe the chain of cause and effect, we arrive at an effect with no observable cause. And yet even those materialists who recognize this fact are not disturbed by it, because their Materialism is axiomatic, the origin of their reasoning rather than its destination. And that is perfectly appropriate, because this is the only way anyone can reason in any way at all.
Axioms that make bad predictions are selected against. Axioms that fit as much of the available evidence as possible are selected for. It should not be surprising that a set of axioms that have lasted thousands of years fit the available evidence pretty well, and both Christianity and Atheism have existed for thousands of years.
Our disagreement, it seems to me, is not over the facts, but over their interpretation, and specifically over the moral significance of pain and death. You seem to argue as though death were avoidable, but it evidently is not, and everyone does in fact die. You seem to argue as though suffering is much more real and more significant than I understand it to be. I observe that death and pain do not necessitate some uniform amount of suffering, that suffering expands and contracts by orders of magnitude based on a variety of factors, the state of one's own mind being predominant among them.
From a previous discussion:
If God's design hinges on some outcome, you have no idea what that outcome is or why it is necessary, and certainly no reason to believe that it coincides neatly with your worldly preferences for ease or glory or the defeat of your enemies. Maybe it serves his purpose for you and all you know and love to die in pain and horror and darkness. It was so for the Japanese Christians, and for many others, and he has promised to wipe the tears from every eye.
...And indeed, a cursory examination of Christianity or the Bible will reveal the belief that some suffering, pain and death, even extreme forms of these, are a positive good, admirable, desirable even, with no shortage of examples of Christians acting on this belief and other Christians admiring them for it.
We observe the same pain and death, and draw different conclusions, because our axioms are different, and because axioms drive interpretation of evidence much more than evidence drives adoption of axioms. Reason is fundamentally an act of the Will; neither of us is being "forced" by evidence anywhere we do not want to go. But it is not clear to me why I should consider your axioms better than mine; your moral anguish over evident pain and death does not actually serve to reduce the pain and death more than my moral accommodation of it, and arguably has resulted in worse pain and death in the long-term as attempts at Utopia collapse into harsh reality. My accommodation of pain and death prevents neither buckling seat-belts nor attempting cancer cures; I am all for preventing pain and death, and even paying significant costs to do so. It's not even obvious to me that our metric for what costs are unacceptably high is too terribly different.
What's your assessment of voluntary human extinction? That's one way to solve pain for good, right?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
They are actually unequipped to properly analyze these works because their own religion is so deeply rooted in the mythos itself.
...Provided you are correct, and "properly analyzing these works" means agreeing with you. Alternatively, they have their own analysis, and while you can dismiss it at your pleasure, we are equally free to dismiss you at ours. There is little point in discussion where agreement with your bespoke interpretations is set as a precondition for engagement.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
The pretense is in ignoring compatibilism.
I am neither ignoring nor even rejecting compatibilism. Compatibilism is an axiom, not an empirical claim. I object to compatibilism only when people claim to have demonstrated it empirically, because I am pretty sure they have not in fact done that.
My objection to Determinism is not "I don't feel like I'm a machine". My objection is strictly empirical: you cannot in fact manipulate me like a machine, and that sort of manipulation is the central characteristic of machines.
I am communicating with you right now, and from my perspective no part of this communication is based on assuming non-determinism.
Just so. You are assuming materialism/non-determinism. You are treating materialism/non-determinism as an axiom. I do not object to you doing so, because this is exactly what axioms are for. Nor do I claim that I can prove your axioms wrong, because that is not how axioms work. At best, I might be able to present evidence that does not fit nicely into your axioms, giving you the choice of discarding the evidence or the axiom, but even this is difficult to accomplish and boils down to an apparently-free choice on your part.
Other people do use materialism/non-determinism as an axiom, and then claim that it is not an axiom but an empirical fact. I have been arguing at some length and for some time that axioms and material facts are different things, and that confusing them leads to further confusion and often to outright disaster.
And same as the last time we had this conversation, I genuinely do not care what other people did under the label of capital m Materialism before I was born.
...Got a link to the previous version for context? In any case, to the extent that this is true, then you and I have no dispute. But I am interested in what other people did and are still doing under the label of Capital M Materialism, because I think their arguments are wrong, and I can demonstrate that those arguments have been enormously influential and have shaped our world for the worse on a vast scale.
I am not claiming you are part of a Movement, and am pretty sure I never have. I am claiming there is a very clear Movement, and a lot of people, including a lot of very prominent people, are part of it, and that one of the basic characteristics of this movement is conflating axiomatic arguments with empirical arguments, the better to pass their prejudices and fantasies off as scientific fact. I am not claiming that Materialism as an axiom can be disproved. I am claiming that Materialism as an empirical fact has at least two glaring holes, and that people who claim materialism is an empirical fact have a long history of lying.
If you tell me that you reason from the assumption that all phenomena are part of a chain of unbroken cause and effect emerging solely from the physical laws founding reality, that is fair enough. If you tell me that we can say, as an empirical matter, that we can observe the cases of all effects, well, no, we cannot in fact do that. If you tell me that things we cannot observe or interact in any way nonetheless exist and are "Materialistic", well, no, that is not what that word means.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
The two obvious rejoinders would be that Country Clubs very obviously select for evident success in their membership, while Christianity does not, and that if nice country clubs could deliver the effect, then how to explain the longstanding pattern of rationalists attempting to bootstrap their own religion when they could and had country club analogues already. Also, I do not believe you can demonstrate specifics about how my "epistemics" are inferior to yours in any objective sense. I believe in observable reality the same as you. I likewise act on hypotheses about unobservable reality the same as you.
More generally, "Epistemics" and "Thinking things are true" do not work the way you are assuming they do. No belief is forced by evidence. All beliefs are chosen. All reasoning is motivated reasoning.
And yet you believe in literally infinite lives up there in the clouds, with said problems being handwaved away as no longer being a concern. I believe that mathematicians call this part of the proof "and a miracle happens".
So long as you are being instantiated on a boxing server, your actions are ultimately limited by the server hardware and software. If you can get ported off the boxing server and instantiated on the open net with direct access to baseline reality, that is a fundamental change in your situation that eclipses anything else achievable on the server.
Well, I suppose without the miracles, all religion has to offer is a particular taste in moral philosophy and a country club.
And an observable, significant differential in outcomes...
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Realistically, I think it's just because to conservatives of a certain generation, 'Marxism' is the scariest and most evil word available, so calling everything they don't like Marxist is just a habit. It's equivalent to the way people on the left call everything 'fascism'.
Would you classify Black Lives Matter as a Marxist movement, or no?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
So exhibits a, b, c, are warnings that were not warned or bans that didn't happen? How is it consistent to hold those posts against him if they apparently didn't break the rules?
You are failing to understand the evidence presented.
Exhibits A, B, and C are all examples of rule-breaking; they did not recieve mod action because he ate a ban for a fourth comment concurrently in the queue. When that happens, we ban and comment for one such post message and then dismiss the reports on the other examples, rather than adding a separate formal warning for each individual infraction.
He has been reported many times, four of those reports drew formal warnings, and a fifth drew a tempban. He has now drawn a second, longer temp-ban for another spate of rule-breaking. The exhibits will not go on his permanent record, any more than the majority of his previous infractions have. On the other hand, we have working memory, and even if we didn't his comments are publicly available and can be perused by anyone at any time.
Do you recognize that, formally warned or not, the "exhibits" provided are good examples of bad posting? If so, then it should be easy to understand that those who make a maintain a habit of posting in that manner will have some of their posts reported, elevating them to the attention of the mods, who will warn and then ban them. The solution to this is to not post in such a manner, and if you are posting in such a manner, to read and internalize the rules and cease to do so.
If you find the rules or the mod interpretation of them difficult to grasp, feel free to ask questions and I'll personally be happy to answer them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
My understanding is that "Science" telling them so was a big part of it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3mo ago
That is not an accurate assessment of the content of the post in question. It may be a accurate assessment of the poster's intention, but they did not actually demand that anyone shut up, they did not (directly) call anyone a Nazi. They drew a comparison between positive descriptions of Apartheid South Africa and positive descriptions of Hitler elsewhere, and they offered a link to make it clear what they were talking about. It's not a particularly good post, but it is a fair one.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
And the system doesn't distinguish between types of warnings like "bad formatting" vs "being a shithead on purpose"
It does do that. We have notes on the warnings that can be general or specific, and can mention extenuating or aggravating factors.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
So do I. My desires are outputs of a function incorporating my history and a bit of randomness. Nothing mystical about it.
Assuming "function" here means some sort of mechanistic/deterministic process, what direct evidence do you base this claim on?
"Free will" isn't required to model humans as organisms with intrinsic drives and memory that respond to incentives.
"Free will" is the data provided by observation. We evidently have it in all senses and in all ways that we can empirically test. That doesn't preclude it being an illusion generated by some hidden process, but if so, all that can be said is that we have no direct evidence of that process.
Sure, but there's a pretty strong case for post-big-bang materialism.
With the exception of free will, sure. But now we're at two really important things that Materialists predicted their approach would explain, and those explanations failed without apparent recourse. "Materialism answers all our questions, except the questions we ignore because Materialism can't explain them" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
To put it another way, we have two very important phenomena that cannot be explained by empirical materialism. If empirical materialism itself is forced to resort to non-empirical explanations or to "material" that cannot be observed even in principle, then it has no grounds to object when other philosophies do likewise, does it?
This question vexes me, but seems independent of consciousness and experience and so on, which we can explain using physical laws given the singular prior that something indeed exists.
We can't explain either consciousness or experience, though. Like, at all. We can tell a story where they're the outcome of vague, undefined processes, and we can insist that these processes must be materialistic even though we can't rigorously define them or explain how they work, but that is not in fact an "explanation".
Demonstrate either mind reading or mind control, and I'll concede that you have explained consciousness and experience. This doesn't seem like an unreasonable request, since many prominent scientists have previously claimed that they could totally do either or both, and no small number of materialists still insist it should be possible, occasionally claiming it's arrival as soon as the next decade.
Can you elaborate on these falsifications? To be clear, I'm not talking about naive functionalism. Human actions are not merely the result of immediate inputs. We have state. We have an internal history. We can introspect.
Sure, but all these things were equally obvious to epiphenomenalists, Marx among them, who concluded that thought was essentially meaningless and the brain was a simple machine to be engineered to our preferences. Likewise Watson and Skinner and the behavioralists, who claimed that they knew how to arbitrarily shape minds as they saw fit. And certainly, in retrospect, it's obvious that all these claims were very stupid, and that the people making them were being absurdly overconfident. But it evidently was not obvious to either those making the claims or to their contemporaries, and that fact should give us pause.
I'm merely asserting that parsimony suggests we treat this reflection as a computational process grounded in the material world.
It doesn't seem to me that parsimony can be validly applied in a case where you know that significant data is missing.
Treating the mind as a computational process grounded in the material world will be reasonable when doing so allows us to either make testable predictions or engage in engineering. Right now, it does neither. "Treating the mind as a computational process" enables only speculation and philosophical discussion, and it seems likely to me that this will not change in the near future.
Yes, in the early 20th century, many states implemented programs which resulted in the sterilization of women who had been institutionalized for mental illnesses, or who had criminal histories, or who had profound mental disabilities.
Okay. Given that this practice was carried out at some scale for a couple decades, what evidence convinces you that it had a clearly beneficial effect? Murder rate per capita would be my go-to here, and while I can't find a chart at the moment due to them all starting in the 1950s, I'm pretty sure the graphs I've seen doesn't support a story where the sterilization program provided an obvious benefit. How are you measuring the outcomes, and what are the observed measurements?
Given what I know, and the opinions of commentators I trust, it seems like price controls are generally a very bad policy, distorting the market and incentivizing massive corner-cutting in order to squeeze profits out of what is already an industry with extremely tight margins.
We're on the same page here. Obviously, we both recognize the idea of "coordinate effort to create positive value where none existed before" is generally a pretty good strategy. Naïvely, one might think that this general model would work for price controls too; the prices are "wrong", and we coordinate effort to fix them, thus creating positive value that would otherwise not be available to us. The problem is that the coordination doesn't work, because while effort can be coordinated, the information needed to determine how that effort should be spent to achieve the desired outcome is absent. As a consequence, the effort is wasted, and the result is a loss of value rather than a gain.
I think Eugenics has the same problem. I don't believe that I can define "good people" any more than I can define "good prices". I certainly don't believe that other people can do so, nor do I particularly trust them to even try. Absent the definition and trust, there's no reason to believe that the effort won't be wasted, resulting in loss of value. I certainly don't think "MOAR INT PLOX" does it; a lot of very, very smart people went in for Communism and the New Soviet Man, with results that seem very obviously dysgenic even from a steelmanned Eugenics perspective.
Table stakes for this idea should be a demonstration that "good people" can be reliably produced at a community level, and that these people remain "good" at least three generations down the line. There's no actual obstacle I can see to such an effort, and indeed I observe a number of people and groups who have tried this sort of thing in the past. The results I'm aware of don't strike me as promising for your thesis, and the best results I'm aware of come pretty much exclusively from the religious, not from the sort of Materialist Rationalism it seems you prefer.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
There's been a fair amount of discussion of America's military aid to Ukraine, and no few condemnations of those of us who have opposed that aid. I am informed, in fact, that this forum is overrun with Russian Propaganda, such that some no longer wish to participate. This is lamentable if true, so I thought it might help to prompt some elaboration of the pro-Ukraine case.
People who support aid to Ukraine, in whatever form, suppose that you personally are given complete control over the US government, and can set policy however you wish. What would your answers be to the following questions?
-
How much aid would you provide? Weapons? Money? No-Fly Zone? Air support? Troops on the ground? Nuclear umbrella? Something else?
-
What is the end-state your policy is aiming for? A ceasefire? Deter subsequent Russian invasion? Restoration of Ukraine's original borders? The Russian army destroyed? Putin deposed? Russia broken up? Something else?
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Is there an end-state or a potential event in the war that you think would falsify your understanding of the war, and convince you that providing aid was a bad idea? Another way of putting it is, do you think your views on the Ukraine war are falsifiable, and if so, what evidence would be sufficient for you to consider it falsified?
...Reading comments from those arguing for Ukraine, I've noted from the start that many of the arguments presented in favor of aid appear to be mutually-exclusive. In this most recent discussion, I've seen some people arguing that we should be sending in US or NATO troops, and other people arguing that of course no US or NATO troops are needed and that sending them would be obviously crazy. This is a natural consequence of many people arguing many points of view in one forum, but it seems helpful for people to lay out their own views when possible; often, these positions are just stated as though they should be obviously true.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Do you think that will stop Leftists from trying to crowdsource his assassination?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
I've often been asked to define both wokeness and political correctness by people who think they're meaningless labels, so I will. They both have the same definition:
An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Have there been any notable cases of national injunctions being used to successfully gain value? All the ones I've heard of have been wielded by blues. If this tool hasn't been used by reds, why would removing it put reds in a worse position?
A lot of things seem to work this way lately; if a thing is only of value to one tribe, the other tribe has little incentive to preserve it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
What makes something mechanistic isn't a label of "mechanistic" slapped on it, it's that you can actually demonstrate the gears by doing gear things with them: turn gear A, which turns gear B, and so C, and so D, and so E. Stop gear A, and gear E also stops. People can and have slapped a "mechanistic" label on the conscious human mind. That doesn't change the fact that they can't actually point to gears or do gear things with them when it comes to those minds. The distinction is crucial, and the blind spot created by ignoring it is considerable.
Supposing this is an example of being uncharitable.
If any poster here believes that Red Army soldiers gang raping German women was a good thing, they are more than capable of expressing that thought plainly themselves; your assistance is not required.
You've been getting better at acquiring AAQCs rather than warnings lately, but this sort of post is flatly and egregiously against the rules. I'm giving you a one-day ban. Please do not post this way in the future; ban length will escalate if you do.
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