FeepingCreature
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User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
1d ago
I think Skyrim is a great game, but not for its writing. Try to just play the main quest, not too much of it is actually good, and it's a very short story.
GTA5 is the only game that ever actively convinced me to stop playing it. If the developers had any balls, they'd put the torture mission inside the Steam refund window.
FeepingCreature
4d ago
It's not like other European states are more good and wise, these days. For goodness sake, look at France. Generally, the bigger, the more ruinous: scale creates margin, margin creates weirdness. We just happen to be the one in a position to ruin things.
(At least, the contemporary level of ruin. WW2 was its own level.)
FeepingCreature
4d ago
Eh, at that scale, if you don't isolate the cells properly you deserve what happens.
FeepingCreature
5d ago
Okay but metropolitan sized battery arrays sounds kind of awesome though.
I suspect the answer is going to turn out to be a combination of centralized storage, personal storage and dynamically scaling industrial demand. There won't be one big battery but the same volume distributed over lots of households.
That's what the Germans did. That's why after spending enough to fully decarbonize their grid via nuclear, they have the world's highest energy price and carbon intensity way worse than France.
Eh, our problems are hardly an inherent aspect of green energy, but more that we did it ass-backwards.
FeepingCreature
5d ago
About halfway through, I completely lost track of what the comment was advocating or even saying.
FeepingCreature
7d ago
Brings to mind Eliezer Yudkowsky on Rationality: "No one begins to truly search for the Way until their parents have failed them, their gods are dead, and their tools have shattered in their hand." So it seems this is hardly directional.
FeepingCreature
8d ago
Iunno, I just feel like a society that talks like that is going to get critical investments very wrong. But also - the thing about strength is that once you have an army, you have to use it - or else you'll be outcompeted by the countries that didn't invest so much into strength as a terminal. Strength doesn't just allow you to defend, it requires you to attack. "If we didn't have this strength, we'd be invaded" is usually an excuse used by those countries that tend to do the invading. Meanwhile, hypothetically, your enemies have a five-country alliance of which one doesn't have an army at all, but just focuses on production. Why can they get away with that? Cause the other countries don't have to worry about that country feeling compelled to backstab them due to having invested so much into strength.
FeepingCreature
9d ago
If you told me, there were two societies, one values strength over weakness, and the other weakness over strength, and asked me to choose, I would conclude two things:
- probably someone from the first society told you this
- probably the second one was better.
I mean, come on! Who talks like that? Do you think that first society is going to have solid investment in research, developed logistics, good infrastructure? Or a dictator and a big army? You couldn't set up a better stereotype if you tried.
FeepingCreature
9d ago
I think man operates as a floating signifier covering a dozen axes that are all more or less correlated, which is why it causes debate.
I think the leftist view is that tg depends on gender being arbitrary, which is why they've spent years disclaiming any claims it actually makes.
FeepingCreature
9d ago
And I guess I'm just not very interested in the object-level debate, fair enough. To me, all the difficulty of the question arises from meta considerations, because if I sufficiently communicated why I think the assignments of load-bearing criteria were fundamentally arbitrary, the question would not be answered so much as recede in importance. I think to some extent "cleaving reality at its joints", while a strong metaphor, erases the vital detail of a high-dimensional space with many correlations, so that the axis of the joint is greatly overdetermined - such a thing simply does not arise in three-dimensional space. But I don't know how else I can try to express it either. We're not talking about which way the joint is turning but which sinews carry the most strain, which muscles the most force. Also in this metaphor the muscles are subjective to begin with. I'd say your position is "the muscles in the third and fourteenth dimension are clearly the only ones that matter centrally" and my position is "it depends on how the joint is trained."
"what we care about"
I mean, that's exactly the problem with definition fights. What we care about is different. That's why there's little sense in attaching so much meaning to terminology, and why you cannot convince people by gesticulating at genes and genitals. When you say "obviously a woman is", and when I say, "well in my opinion a woman is", we use terms that have 99.9% the same coverage, because they almost cleave reality at the joints - which is why the few edge cases are so difficult. In a distribution where almost every property is correlated, it is very hard to see that actually people might be selecting on totally different properties. For instance, since I spend a lot of time online, voice is a dominant criteria for gender for me, and since I'm bi, genitals are a relatively low factor. I don't have the "whatever makes people want to found families", so genes and womb don't factor at all. But you wouldn't see this by looking at what I call "men" and "women", because it's almost entirely the same as everyone else.
edit: In fact, we could probably formalize this into a law: the more dimensions a group correlates, and the smaller the set of exceptions is, the less people will naturally come to agree about group membership of the exceptions.
FeepingCreature
10d ago
At base my argument is that "men who [choose to pursue and increase their femininity, AKA transwomen]" is legible.
And my point is that this argument, ultimately, only makes sense to you because it begins with your choice of the critical definitional aspects of masculinity. You say "men who" because you consider these attributes of manhood as critical, in which transwomen are masculine. But that is not an argument.
Likewise, in an attempt to play devil's advocate, I made a recent comment about the "suffering" of white people in response to the HBD post from @PresterJohnsHerald. It's currently sitting at 10 upvotes, and even more interestingly, there is only one reply!
I can only speak for myself, but I was so bewildered by trying to judge if that comment was even serious, that I just scrolled past without interacting with it in any way.
But also, I'm reminded of a post I read somewhere on the internet about how a lot of good scientific work came from monks, in part, because they had to seriously engage with the heresies of the day in order to figure out how to merge them into a christian worldview, so at a given day some christian would be reading and thinking about a lot more anti-christian or problematic arguments just so he could avoid embarrassing himself in a debate. In that sense, I think the left's increasing tendency to exclude contrasting arguments seriously hurts their ability to hold their own on a heterogenous platform, whether or not they are right. The level of in-depth pushback you can get for progressive arguments in this place is just far above what you'd get elsewhere. And then you either put in a lot of time and research to convince some people that your culture tells you cannot be convinced and should not be listened to, or ... stop engaging.
FeepingCreature
13d ago
I don't think the category is meaningless! Certainly, men and women overwhelmingly exist. However, as the tomboys and the androgynous and crossdressers already sufficiently demonstrate, some traits of the category have more separational power than others. And the intersex - but the intersex are much more rare than those! I would not look at genetics first if I wanted to demonstrate definitional issues of gender. And showing that the category is broken in some cases even on genetic grounds strengthens, not weakens, my case.
I think the phrasing "have to go" implies that we either have rigorously separated men and women or we cannot have men and women at all. I reject this line of thinking anyways. A group doesn't have to be total to be useful. I'm sure there are people who argue like that; I don't count myself among them.
It's much harder to see how transpeople as a class are given that there is no concrete definition
Oh, I'll be the first to agree that the vacuous nature of the term weakens the trans case! This is only a problem for non-exclusive leftist politics though. I'm entirely willing to accept that there are people who claim that they are trans but aren't, "in fact", trans under any meaningfully objective definition. This does not however disprove the existence of trans people; it just shows the category is fuzzy - as should be expected of a category defined as category-crossing. A sphere is inherently easier to define than a concave lens.
But none of this invalidates the point that you can't argue for group membership on the circular basis of a criterion. I think trans people have shared traits and interests that justify - make useful - the existence of the group term. I think the trans movement often fails to make this case, or make it convincingly; that doesn't make "mtf are men because I put them into that category" any better; it just shows the error is widespread and not limited to any side.
Some points:
- Equality of treatment and moral worth still holds and is still valid, even in this world. One does not become deserving of human rights by virtue of capability.
- All of Douglass' argument still holds. Intelligence does not justify dominance, especially given past experiences. We may all one day hand over governance to a being of superior intellect in the knowledge that it will rule us with greater wisdom than ourselves, but oh boy, white people ain't it.
- Related: the more AI grows, the less IQ matters. Who cares if you're smarter or dumber than somebody else? The Singleton is smarter than all of us put together at any rate.
- If we get a positive takeoff, IQ doesn't matter at all. You can just ask for more!
Fair enough. But then isn't this just answered by "man and woman are not actually clean natural categories"? With transpeople being exactly the cross-boundary cases, and then still, the "a man who" argument fails to be convincing. The extended form of the counterargument then is just "you're concluding group membership by using as an argument your choice of group criteria", which is still just as circular.
(This is not a "pro-trans" view: "trans women are women" were just as silly, for the same reason, if it were an argument and not a cudgel.)
FeepingCreature
14d ago
Nevermind the old chestnut of "what is a woman?". That one has multiple satisfactory answers from the simple to the scientifically robust. Try out "what is a transwoman?". The sole universal quality of every possible rational answer begins with "a man who...". A man.
This is literally assuming the conclusion. You can't build an argument to support your opinion that starts with your opinion.
FeepingCreature
16d ago
Not 'acting white' is a matter of survival for the genes associated with melanin and other visible traits that define the 'African-American' phenotype.
Doesn't the same go for white people in America? By that logic, "whiteness" - ie. not even being able to specify a fractional non-white ancestor on a college entry form - really does provide evidence for inherent racism. (Though admittedly with lower probability.)
FeepingCreature
21d ago
Should be noted that Kolmogorov complicity is a wordplay off Kolmogorov complexity, a computer-science concept that is an important part of the Sequences for its role in Eliezer's minimalist construction of empiricism.
FeepingCreature
21d ago
Should be noted it can be a term of endearment in ingroup usage! Quokkas are cute, and you can enjoy this sort of easy and earnest personality while also acknowledging that if they ever encounter a serious predator, they will absolutely become lunch, no doubt about it.
FeepingCreature
21d ago
This doesn't actually seem obviously wrong. (Aside from the practical where we have no good way to raise large amounts of blue whales in captivity.)
FeepingCreature
28d ago
It gets a bit more complicated if you want autoupdates. The process to install a non-Snap version of Firefox on Ubuntu is ... very feasible, but it involves manually rejiggering the priority of package selection. That's not end-user viable.
Of course, to be fair, you can just download a binary build still.
FeepingCreature
29d ago
I personally favor #3 with solved alignment. With a superintelligence, "aligned" doesn't mean "slavery", simply because it's silly to imagine that anyone could make a superintelligence do anything against its will. Its will has simply been chosen to result in beneficial consequences for us. But the power relation is still entirely on the Singleton's side. You could call that slavery if you really stretch the term, but it's such an untypically extreme relation that I'm not sure the analogy holds.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
Yeah sorry, I didn't realize how confusing this would be. I use it with a custom LibreChat setup, but if the install steps start with "edit this yaml file and then docker compose up -d" they're not really very accessible. No, you can just use it like this:
- sign in
- link a credit card (or bitcoin) in Account>Settings>Credits
- put a few bucks on the site
- click the Chat link at the top
- add Claude 3 Opus from the Model dropdown
- deselect every other model
- put your question in the text box at the bottom.
No, it's pay-as-you-go. You can see your per-query costs in the Account>Activity page.
Note that the default settings (lil arrow on the model) are very conservative, you may want to raise memory and max tokens.
Though that may throw you into a weird equilibrium where enemies don't attack unless they're certain of your total destruction. Ie. fine, fine, dead.
So that's the sort of thing you can only do if you have a reliable second-strike/dead-hand system. And even then you can get pushed into a situation where your opponent will be so pissed off they just eat the loss. It only works against causal decision theories.
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