FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
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User ID: 157
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
2d ago
People who tend to be "this is the body of a person" when talking about a turkey or joint of beef on the dinner table are also likely to be "we must not impose our morals on others" when it comes to unconventional and non-Western beliefs and practices.
I don't dislike the author, I appreciate that they are a sensitive person trying to do good as they see it. I dislike the neuroticism of the zealot veganism philosophy. The piece admits the failure mode of the Pledge was forcing the non-vegans into a choice of "me or them?" and then breaking off relationships over what the non-vegans are going to see as "it's just a meal".
Ritual cannibalism has indeed been practiced, though the debate over how widespread, how long, and for what reasons, continues; I doubt that the ethical vegans would stretch their ethics to condemnation of such cultures as being wrong, unnatural, etc. because that is Western colonialist thinking. They might condemn it on the grounds of all meat-eating being wrong, but not because humans are different or superior to animals.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
3d ago
Conservatives make a grave mistake simping for troops. They did absolutely nothing for you. The military industrial complex has wasted trillions, murdered millions and is if anything spying and influencing far more than China and Russia combined.
Difference between the grunts on the ground and the people in offices sending them out there, though. My late father was in the Irish army so I do have a tendency to go "I'm not blaming the poor bloody infantry for this clusterfuck because it's not Private Jones or Sergeant Smith or Major Brown deciding to fly off to Syria, it's civilian never wore bull's wool in their life Secretary Tonclint doing it". A lot of conservatives/Red Tribe/as you wish will have family, friends, acquaintances, co-workers who are or were at that level of "the military-industrial complex", or know people in that range, and so when they are "respecting the troops" it's Cousin Benny or Aunt Julia's ex-boyfriend they're identifying as "the troops".
Of course there are the types who go "respect the troops!" simply on political partisan grounds or to 'we must appeal to the rubes and simps by wrapping ourselves in the flag' or who are at the higher levels of the military-industrial complex, but when I hear about "50 ordinary soldiers killed out foreign", in general I think "the poor bastards" and not "serves the colonialising invading pawns of the M-I complex right!"
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
2d ago
I do see their point and why they tried it, but I also wonder how otherwise intelligent people could not see why this would fail. If you don't want to associate with meat-eaters, you can certainly all gather into your own little bubble of vegans. But when it involves dealing with the wider public and especially your own family, it's going to have consequences. The idealistic among them seem to have assumed that other people would accept their views, be convinced of the moral horror of eating turkey or beef or pork, and change the entire traditional meal to fit around "no animal products at all" (some vegans are very evangelical on this and would not accept the use of butter, cream, cheese, etc. in a meal).
While people might be willing to go "Okay, we'll do a special vegan selection for you", they are less likely to go "and you can eat it at a separate little table of your own" (though they might stretch that far) and are not at all likely to go "okay we will junk the Thanksgiving/Christmas dinner/Fourth of July barbeque and all eat salad and fake meat products".
The authoress of the original piece has it in three parts, the third part being Vegan Tables: A Letter To The People I Love.
And this is the part that makes me wince:
Piled on top of that is the guilt I feel every time I don’t speak up. I see people fishing in the park, and I wonder if there’s something I could say to prevent someone from suffocating to death in the next few minutes.
What she means by "someone suffocating to death" is the fish. Not the people fishing, the fish. When you get to the level of "fish are people like humans are people", then there isn't much mutual ground remaining to be covered between that view and the view that "eating meat is acceptable". And the rest of the letter, though sincere, and I don't think meant to come off this way, does come off as emotional manipulation and arm-twisting with guilt: if you love me, agree not to eat meat:
I want to let you in on this part of my world because I care about our relationship. I don’t want to relate to you in a way that holds such a large part of myself back; I want you to know what it’s like to be me. I also share this to give you some information about what might make our relationship more comfortable for me. If you’re willing, when we eat together or attend an event where food is served, it would do so much to help me feel seen and welcome if you decided to go without animal products. I ask this of you, specifically, because you’re someone I feel close to and supported by. I know that not everyone will oblige to this request, and I don’t make it of everyone.
You love me, don't you? I've just told you how much I care about you! Why won't you ease my suffering by this tiny little concession? And at that point, either you (the family member or friend) bluntly state "Sorry but you're crazy, fish are not people" or you try to accommodate them and set yourself up for continuing attempts to bludgeon you via emotional manipulation into becoming vegan yourself. And if you don't give in, then she will break off the relationship, and continue on with "why are people so cruel that they would prefer to indulged in misery and suffering and to destroy our friendship and bond rather than give up this savagery?" and feel vindicated in her martyrdom.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
3d ago
It's arguments as soldiers and I have to constantly remind myself to keep in mind (1) don't do it myself, i.e. uphold now something I formerly said I opposed simply because it's someone on My Side saying it or it is an effective tactic in an argument I'm having and (2) be aware of when My Side and Our Guys do it as well.
I frequently get smacked on the wrist by the mods for breaches of "boo outgroup", but from my perspective, I'm being consistent: there are some things I don't accept, and I don't care if it's Susie Green or the Pope arguing for acceptance of those things, I'll oppose them both. And if the Pope says it, I'll say he's wrong (at the moment, despite it all, Francis is not saying that yet on some topics so, so far, so good) even though otherwise I do accept the authority of the Pope as the boss of me.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
4d ago
The main problem is that these guys think that under the perfect 'no Christian egalitarian shit' system, they would be LORDS AND MASTERS.
They wouldn't. Best they could get, they'd be some kind of household staff dealing with running the kitchens and stores for the real LORDS AND MASTERS. Worst case? They'd be ground down into the dirt. "But I am so smart and big-brain!" "Yes, and I have big sword. Which of us wins this contest?"
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
3d ago
Tolkien, for example. Based on his works, at least, he seems to have truly appreciated that sort of emotion, something like "I may not be the king, but I wish that whoever is the king is a good and just king who helps his people".
From 1943 letter of Tolkien to his son Christopher:
My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang', it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediævals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that – after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world – is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way. The quarrelsome, conceited Greeks managed to pull it off against Xerxes; but the abominable chemists and engineers have put such a power into Xerxes' hands, and all ant-communities, that decent folk don't seem to have a chance. We are all trying to do the Alexander-touch – and, as history teaches, that orientalized Alexander and all his generals. The poor boob fancied (or liked people to fancy) he was the son of Dionysus, and died of drink. The Greece that was worth saving from Persia perished anyway; and became a kind of Vichy-Hellas, or Fighting-Hellas (which did not fight), talking about Hellenic honour and culture and thriving on the sale of the early equivalent of dirty postcards. But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to. Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin's bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs. There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as 'patriotism', may remain a habit! But it won't do any good, if it is not universal.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
4d ago
I mean, I yield to no-one in my admiration for the 13th century, but these guys don't want the hierarchical orderly beauty of the Great Chain of Being, they want some imagined ideal Roman Empire where they're lolling around in togas being Great Thinkers and Masters of the Universe, while getting to order around their inferiors without all of that pesky nonsense about women and foreigners are also children of God. Where the strong do what they wish and the weak suffer what they must, and they imagine they would be the strong, of course. They're wrong, and what's even more is that they have no idea how much of what they want has been shaped by the influences of Christianised Western society for centuries, because it's the water these fish are swimming in.
Chesterton wrote about the dream of the ideal beauty and order of hierarchy, the temptation of it, and the way it can be subtly twisted to the wrong, in The Ball and the Cross, and it's a dream that tempts me because it appeals to my own instincts and what I find beautiful, but these types who sneer about 'slave morality' are not even strong enough to lose or humble enough to be proud; they seem to admire the same kind of show of strength that some gang boss in a grubby slum exhibits in a drive-by spray and pray:
As the flying ship swept round the dome he observed other alterations. The dome had been redecorated so as to give it a more solemn and somewhat more ecclesiastical note; the ball was draped or destroyed, and round the gallery, under the cross, ran what looked like a ring of silver statues, like the little leaden images that stood round the hat of Louis XI. Round the second gallery, at the base of the dome, ran a second rank of such images, and Evan thought there was another round the steps below. When they came closer he saw that they were figures in complete armour of steel or silver, each with a naked sword, point upward; and then he saw one of the swords move. These were not statues but an armed order of chivalry thrown in three circles round the cross. MacIan drew in his breath, as children do at anything they think utterly beautiful. For he could imagine nothing that so echoed his own visions of pontifical or chivalric art as this white dome sitting like a vast silver tiara over London, ringed with a triple crown of swords.
As they went sailing down Ludgate Hill, Evan saw that the state of the streets fully answered his companion's claim about the reintroduction of order. All the old blackcoated bustle with its cockney vivacity and vulgarity had disappeared. Groups of labourers, quietly but picturesquely clad, were passing up and down in sufficiently large numbers; but it required but a few mounted men to keep the streets in order. The mounted men were not common policemen, but knights with spurs and plume whose smooth and splendid armour glittered like diamond rather than steel. Only in one place—at the corner of Bouverie Street—did there appear to be a moment's confusion, and that was due to hurry rather than resistance. But one old grumbling man did not get out of the way quick enough, and the man on horseback struck him, not severely, across the shoulders with the flat of his sword.
“The soldier had no business to do that,” said MacIan, sharply. “The old man was moving as quickly as he could.”
“We attach great importance to discipline in the streets,” said the man in white, with a slight smile.
“Discipline is not so important as justice,” said MacIan.
The other did not answer.
Then after a swift silence that took them out across St. James's Park, he said: “The people must be taught to obey; they must learn their own ignorance. And I am not sure,” he continued, turning his back on Evan and looking out of the prow of the ship into the darkness, “I am not sure that I agree with your little maxim about justice. Discipline for the whole society is surely more important than justice to an individual.”
Evan, who was also leaning over the edge, swung round with startling suddenness and stared at the other's back.
“Discipline for society——” he repeated, very staccato, “more important—justice to individual?”
Then after a long silence he called out: “Who and what are you?”
“I am an angel,” said the white-robed figure, without turning round.
“You are not a Catholic,” said MacIan.
The other seemed to take no notice, but reverted to the main topic.
“In our armies up in heaven we learn to put a wholesome fear into subordinates.”
MacIan sat craning his neck forward with an extraordinary and unaccountable eagerness.
“Go on!” he cried, twisting and untwisting his long, bony fingers, “go on!”
“Besides,” continued he, in the prow, “you must allow for a certain high spirit and haughtiness in the superior type.”
“Go on!” said Evan, with burning eyes.
“Just as the sight of sin offends God,” said the unknown, “so does the sight of ugliness offend Apollo. The beautiful and princely must, of necessity, be impatient with the squalid and——”
“Why, you great fool!” cried MacIan, rising to the top of his tremendous stature, “did you think I would have doubted only for that rap with a sword? I know that noble orders have bad knights, that good knights have bad tempers, that the Church has rough priests and coarse cardinals; I have known it ever since I was born. You fool! you had only to say, 'Yes, it is rather a shame,' and I should have forgotten the affair. But I saw on your mouth the twitch of your infernal sophistry; I knew that something was wrong with you and your cathedrals. Something is wrong; everything is wrong. You are not an angel. That is not a church. It is not the rightful king who has come home.”
“That is unfortunate,” said the other, in a quiet but hard voice, “because you are going to see his Majesty.”
“No,” said MacIan, “I am going to jump over the side.”
“Do you desire death?”
“No,” said Evan, quite composedly, “I desire a miracle.”
“From whom do you ask it? To whom do you appeal?” said his companion, sternly. “You have betrayed the king, renounced his cross on the cathedral, and insulted an archangel.”
“I appeal to God,” said Evan, and sprang up and stood upon the edge of the swaying ship.
The being in the prow turned slowly round; he looked at Evan with eyes which were like two suns, and put his hand to his mouth just too late to hide an awful smile.
“And how do you know,” he said, “how do you know that I am not God?”
MacIan screamed. “Ah!” he cried. “Now I know who you really are. You are not God. You are not one of God's angels. But you were once.”
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
6d ago
For a long time, it's been a tricky balancing act. Don't put out? You're a frigid bitch. Do put out? You're a slut. Men seem to want (and I'm emphasising "seem" here because this is all gross generalisation) women to be agreeable to have sex with them, but never to have had sex with previous partners, or only a couple of previous partners. If you think about it, it's not really doable; if you dump/break up with the girlfriend and both of you move on to new relationships, after a while you're both going to have a past history. If Joe has had more relationships than Annie, that's great. If Joe and Annie have the same number, that may be a problem: too high for Annie, too low for Joe even on the same numbers. If Annie has had more relationships than Joe, that's bad because that means she's promiscuous.
The double standard hurts men and women both because men are supposed to rack up more experience, but women are not, which means how do you do that? If the guy is always dating a new girlfriend who had only one or two boyfriends before him, then a small number of men are getting all the 'good' girls and leaving 'sullied' girls after them for the rest of the guys.
So women have an incentive to report lower numbers, and men to report higher numbers, of previous partners than they really have had.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
3d ago
the catholic church which has leaned heavily into thirdworldism, taking the white population as granted and gunning for as many black and latin targets they can get their geriatric hands on.
I grin smugly in satisfaction that the anti-Popery hysteria of the 17th century has never gone away, it's just under a very thin veneer of outward secularism: it's all the fault of Christians and by Christians we mean THE ROMANISTS!!!!
Here, have some sinister geriatrics on their way to grab some targets 😁
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1d ago
Looking at security cameras and seeing if something bad is going on was a job, or at least a huge part of a job. Driving a truck for hours along the highway was a job. Converting a text to bullet points and back was a job. Making thematically appropriate illustrations to text-heavy articles was a job. Writing articles based on a press release was a job.
See, this is where I thought AI risk would lie, if anywhere (apart from real people being stupid and greedy enough to think they could get AI to run the government or something) and I agree, this is where the actual application of AI is going to impact society.
The forecast fears for 'why we must make sure AI is aligned' were of AI getting out into the wild and taking over the fabric of global rule because now there was a rival intelligence to that of humanity, with its own cold alien goals and aims. What we have instead is chatbots that hallucinate and the people who love them.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
2d ago
I've been asked to repost this in the Culture War thread, so here we go.
I read this story today and it did amuse me, for reasons to be explained.
Fear not, AI doomerists, Northrop Grumman is here to save you from the paperclip maximiser!
The US government has asked leading artificial intelligence companies for advice on how to use the technology they are creating to defend airlines, utilities and other critical infrastructure, particularly from AI-powered attacks.
The Department of Homeland Security said Friday that the panel it’s creating will include CEOs from some of the world’s largest companies and industries.
The list includes Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, but also the head of defense contractors such as Northrop Grumman and air carrier Delta Air Lines.
I am curious if this is the sort of response the AI safety lobby wanted from the government. But it also makes me think in hindsight, how quaint the AI fears were - all those 50s SF fever dreams of rogue AI taking over the world and being our tyrant god-emperor from Less Wrong and elsewhere, back before AI was actually being sold by the pound by the tech conglomerates. How short a time ago all that was, and yet how distant it now seems, faced with reality.
Reality being that AI is not going to become superduper post-scarcity fairy godmother or paperclipper, it is being steered along the same old lines:
War and commerce.
That's pretty much how I expected it to go, more so for the commerce side, but look! Already the shiny new website is up! I can't carp too much about that, since I did think the Space Force under Trump was marvellous (ridiculous, never going to be what it might promise to be, but marvellous) so I can't take that away from the Biden initiative. That the Department of Homeland Security is the one in charge thrills me less. Though they don't seem to be the sole government agency making announcements about AI, the Department of State seems to be doing it as well.
What I would like is the better-informed to read the names on lists being attached to all this government intervention and see if any sound familiar from the EA/Less Wrong/Rationalists working on AI forever side, there's someone there from Stanford but I don't know if they're the same as the names often quoted in Rationalist discussions (like Bostrom etc., not to mention Yudkowsky).
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
2d ago
Sure, but that's vegetarianism not veganism, and these people are hell-for-leather pure 100% vegans. If they were willing to compromise on a vegetarian option, I think there would be less friction (permitting eggs, cheese, dairy products for the meat-eaters and in food). It's the ones who don't want any such options who are going to run into trouble, the ones who are "you put butter into the mashed potatoes so I'm not eating those even though they're one of the few vegetable options for the meal, plus I'm going to sulk about the rest of you eating butter and cream".
To do the writer justice, the wider movement seems to have copped on that the original strict version was a failure:
The practical difference between the original Liberation Pledge and our update is that the original Pledge was delivered in a static state, “I don’t sit at tables where animals are being eaten” where the outcome of the updated Pledge is determined through conversation in collaboration with the other. “I’m thinking about Thanksgiving and feeling pretty worried about how I’ll feel with a turkey there. What’s coming up for you hearing that much? I think I understand, am I getting it? Are you open to hearing more about what’s coming up for me? How is that to hear? How would it be for you to… go without the turkey? Let me prepare a main dish instead? Have me visit after dinner? What ideas do you have for how we can work this out?”
Another difference in this proposal is to rethink our request as specific to a relationship, not a table or event. This can set us up for more realistic positive outcomes and help us invest our energy in productive ways. You might choose to attend a large family reunion where animals are being eaten and only make the request to those you most know and trust, letting their show of solidarity be a signal to others.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
2d ago
I believe the correct term is homosociality rather than homoeroticism, though there is an element of homoeroticism in some of these groups of course (like you can find an element of anything in some group involved in anything at all).
That, and preferably to have "lords and masters" who aren't Blue Tribers unremittingly hostile by nature to the continued existence of the Red Tribe as a culture.
That is the problem, though. The dream is to replace the current overlords with our lot, not their lot. But having overlords who can impose their values over the wishes of the mass of the ordinary people is the antithesis of the slave morality accusation; that's the powerful exercising power as they see fit. There is of course a lot more to the whole concept of master morality versus slave morality, but it doesn't matter that 'the lords and masters are favouring their pets and favourites' except this time they are 'minorities' makes it slave morality; the lords and masters favouring their pets and favourites is what masters do, before the message of "the last shall be first and the first shall be last" comes to be widely accepted (and even afterwards).
Having X Tribe lords and masters who, despite that, take into consideration the existence of Y tribe as a culture and accept that they have a right to exist - that's slave morality Christianity.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
4d ago
Guy, men, lads, fellas, I don't even know where to begin with all this. I am intrigued that Catholics Not Christians, though 😀 So the Horrid Popish Plot met the Global Zionist Conspiracy and we made beautiful music together?
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
3d ago
Technically, so long as it isn't ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals, isn't it always a possibility that the pope is wrong about [insert topic here]? I mean, at least from the Catholic perspective?
Oh, yeah. The Pope can't say "The Brazil nut is the one and only official nut of the Catholic Church and anyone consuming any other nut is going straight to Hell". There's wiggle room. If he's going to change teaching, he better have a dang good reason and an entire team of theologians backing him up (this applies to any pope, I'm not picking on Francis in particular here).
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
3d ago
Based on... ? nothing but "trust me, I'm a doctor".
He seems to have believed it at first, was horrified by what seemed a huge amount of incest and sexual assault by the middle-class on their children, and eventually was talked around/persuaded himself to the view that it couldn't be true, but was instead a sublimation of the Oedipus/Electra Complex; children's first sexual attachment was to their parents as the nearest intimate relationship, girls wanted to marry their fathers and boys wanted to marry their mothers because of this, and once puberty and sexual awakening set in, these impulses were translated into dreams or fantasies of sexual encounters with the father or mother.
As medical/scientific treatment, it's terrible. But as a respectable middle-class Viennese doctor, especially as a Jewish man who was already suspect simply due to prejudice in society? It's understandable; he couldn't imagine such things to be true (any more than in the early days of the Catholic sex abuse scandal people could imagine it to be really true) so an alternate explanation that tidied away the facts was preferable. And then he swung all his authority behind it to show this must be the real explanation, which did all the damage.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
4d ago
I'm not sure if the version we sang as secondary school kids at Mass in the late 70s/early 80s is the one you mean, but the very name makes me shudder.
I will gladly donate to this worthy ecumenical project!
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
4d ago
Again, not blaming men as the primary movers and shakers. But in all the "birth rate dropping, women should be having more babies" discussion I see, nobody is talking about the other side of the equation - the fathers of these babies. Women are not having babies for reasons of convenience, but so are men. If you want more marriage, stable marriage, and more babies, you need to sort out the culture and social values and that includes guys as well as dolls. Men also have expectations, standards, and conditioning from wider society around marriage and family (which culturally has shifted from "early marriage, be main breadwinner, have two to four kids" to "develop your career, enjoy yourself while still young, mature adulthood is put off until thirties, kids are an expensive drag which prevent you from spending your money on having fun and buying stuff").
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
5d ago
My own view is that there is not going to be magic all-powerful AI providing for the world, so most people are goiung to have to work for a living just like always. The type of work available may be different, but the profits of AI are going to the big institutional shareholders.
I'm not saying you don't intend the best for your kids, but your view of "this is best for you" and their view of the results, which after all they are the ones living with it, may differ. "Dad, I hated that from the age of three you were measuring me every week and if I didn't match up to what you expected, your disappointment and disapproval were evident. Sure, I'm six foot tall, but I'd prefer to be five foot nine and we spent time together doing stuff when I was a kid".
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
5d ago
At the end of the day people who care about improving things and have specific goals like a society with more healthy monogamous relationships and at least replacement fertility rate, should change things.
Yeah, and if men want that, they are going to have to face up to it that they can't eat their cake and have it: be 'sowing their wild oats' in their 20s with a bunch of hot, willing chicks, then settle down in their 30s with a modest wifey to pop out kids. If you want hot chicks willing to have casual sex with you, you are going to have a culture where women will expect the same sexual market value as men. If you don't want a culture of promiscuity and infertility, you are going to have to change back to the old values of "respectable men don't fuck around and will try and wait for marriage".
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
2d ago
I think you can legitimately be concerned about fishing, particularly commercial fishing which is often destructive, but when you are basing it on "fish are people" then yeah. Fish are very much on the brainless end of the spectrum, and while they do feel pain as a living organism, it's hard to argue that they are aware in the same way you might argue a cow is aware.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
2d ago
I wasn't sure whether or not it qualified as Culture War, it's more my own amused/jaundiced view on how the intervention on AI safety, which people have been calling for, is going in reality - which is the big corporations which stand to make mega-bucks out of AI are the ones getting seats on the board, not the EA/Less Wrong/similarly aligned AI researchers.
Which is pretty much how I expected it to go, to be honest. I'll stick it into CW thread if you think that's the best place for it.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
2d ago
Freud was wrong on a lot of things, but he really was a trailblazer in setting the course of psychotherapy. Late 19th century Vienna was a hothouse society, over-heated and over-stuffed and neurotic and about due to burst at the seams, and the kinds of patients he was getting would be those wealthy enough to be able to afford a private specialist for a long course of treatment. They would also be the most disturbed, so he was also getting the worst cases (that were not already in asylums), the result being that he would get the nasty, dirty scandal cases. And naturally he couldn't accept that this was really all true, plus the fear that if he went at all public with this in the medical world he would be finished and on top of that open to anti-Semitic accusations that he was a dirty Jew trying to throw muck at the good Catholic Austro-Hungarian empire. On top of that he was working out his own theories of sexuality which involved the acceptance of early childhood sexuality being present, that children are not a blank slate who only experience erotic impulses when puberty switches it all on. So he had several reasons to change from "this is real" to "this is the seduction theory".
Reading that post about the Liberation Pledge makes me sad, because here is a perfectly nice person with good intentions who only wants to do good and reduce harm, and they might as well be an alien from another planet when it comes to understanding ordinary people:
That right there from the start: it's not a body, it's a carcass. And it's not someone, it's something. An animal is not a person. Plus, I get the distinct impression that were this a report on an Oceanian tribe that practiced consumption of the remains of the deceased as a ritual of respect, we'd get the whole "we should not impose Western moral values on others" about something that really was "putting someone's body on the menu".
You know where the added stigma was? I'm going to take a wild guess and that it wasn't on the part of shame-faced carnivores around "eating animals", but rather "that stupid notion that made Jenny refuse to attend Granny's last Thanksgiving before she died, the last time the family all saw her, just because of a dumb turkey dinner. She was Granny's favourite grandkid! And we all knew Granny wasn't doing so good! And she just would not come because of that vegan rubbish, she cared more about some dead turkey than about Granny!"
The problem is, veganism is a moral judgement, and nobody likes moral judgements. The same people who would be horrified about some bigot telling a gay family member that they were sinful and in need of having their soul saved has no problem telling meat eater family and friends that they are damned souls going to carnist hell.
As the article points out, the Pledge backfired because it involved breaking off relationships with family and those close to the vegan; the moral purity being not "He eats with tax collectors and sinners" but "They eat with meat-eaters".
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