FeepingCreature
No bio...
User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
8d ago
I mean, it's funny but it makes no sense; if you swap genders, you still don't actually benefit. And once I realize that, I remember that people just don't raise children for "the benefit." I mean, I guess your progeny can look after you in your old age, but a daughter can do that just as well as a son. I guess the joke is entirely the subtext that women are only valuable sexually.
FeepingCreature
9d ago
The point is: report, don't engage. The rules explicitly do not support defensive/retributive rules violations.
FeepingCreature
9d ago
Yeah and as an additional factor, moral obligations and state actions are fundamentally different in kind because moral obligations are individual whereas state actions are collective. You have a moral obligation to save the drowning child even if you are surrounded on all sides by callous assholes; standing in a group of bystanders does not morally relieve you of failure to render aid. Conversely, if your society has decided on a tax rate that is erroneously, ruinously low, you do not have a moral or legal obligation to pay regardless, because in that situation we acknowledge that uneven enforcement is even more corrosive than wrong policy.
FeepingCreature
8d ago
I mean, to put the greatest possible stress on this policy... returning escaped German Jews to Nazi Germany: moral? I mean, sure you have to say that "actually, the Holocaust is morally wrong --" but then you get into hot water along the lines of - well, is killing pirates morally wrong? If yes, what's the difference? If no, why not do it yourself? I guess one would have to say that killing criminals is wrong, but it's the sort of wrong that states may disagree about, as opposed to genociding innocents?
FeepingCreature
8d ago
I think a place is different than a purpose because it's a lot harder to disagree about a place. I mean, what is a mall? What if you're sitting in a tram wearing a funny hat and a cop says that the tram is actually a mall so you have to pay a fee? And what if a judge agrees? This scenario is not worrying because in this world sanity has clearly broken down. But replace the mall with "intent to conceal" and it starts looking a lot more plausible.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
About halfway through, I completely lost track of what the comment was advocating or even saying.
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
1mo 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
17d ago
Problem is that there's not enough counterweight then to keep that president from messing with the legislation or even just enforcement around voting. Eight years you're out is legible enough to create a Schelling point to unite the country around enforcement. Look at the drama in the last election around single-digit percentages of votes. That is a healthy thing, I like seeing that. I think it'd be too easy to suppress that with near-absolute power.
FeepingCreature
29d ago
I don't think this shows preference so much as path dependence. All of those are Schelling points where just having an agreed standard is more valuable than having the best or most culturally resonant one.
FeepingCreature
1mo 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
1mo 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.
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!
FeepingCreature
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo ago
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.
FeepingCreature
1mo 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
5mo ago
Desecrating any of these
Atheist point of order: you cannot desecrate them, because they are not sacred.
The Invisible Pink Unicorn (possibly made of pink-glazed blown glass, in the style of My Little Pony) as the steed bearing the returning Jesus, depicted as a Super-Saiyan, His head and hair burning white, His eyes like a flame of fire, His feet like fine brass
Honestly, I believe many atheists would consider that "fucking awesome".
FeepingCreature
4mo ago
Trans-Exclusive Regular Feminist
FeepingCreature
1mo 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
1mo 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
2mo ago
As a doomer safety tribe person, I'm broadly in favor of catgirls, so long as they can reliably avoid taking over the planet and exterminating humanity. There are ethical concerns around abuse and dependency in relations where one party has absolute control over the other's mindstate, but they can probably be resolved, and probably don't really apply to today's models anyways - and anyways they pale in comparison to total human genocide.
But IMO this is the difference: whether safe catgirls are in the limit possible and desirable. And I don't think that's a small difference either!
FeepingCreature
2mo ago
Thanks for the writeup! I was wondering what was happening with that since I only caught the edge of the drama.
FeepingCreature
1mo 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.
Not at all; it's an implication that you consider other subsections vulnerable to rape, that is, desirable. "Unrapeable" says "not even with zero effort or consequences would she get any".
If you're rating on a spectrum, you get "I would put effort into getting laid with this person" as the higher tier, but then there's a tier of "sure, would fuck if an opportunity arose". That's the "rape" tier; it's not saying you want to engage in rape, but that rape is the obvious-to-come-to-mind situation in which their attractiveness would overcome the thus-lowered effort barrier. If there was a rapist in the room, they would rape this person. They would not rape the lower tier - unrapeable - because it would be actively unenjoyable, net negative even if free. "Thanks, I'd rather masturbate."
A less edgy schoolyard way to phrase the same thing is "would pay to fuck", "would fuck if you paid me" and "not even if you paid me."
More options
Context Copy link