FeepingCreature
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User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
Can you actually cite the evidence against, please?
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
I mean, yes. Sometimes we commit suicide, sometimes cells commit cancer. I didn't say it was good, I'm saying it's not unusual. It's the sort of thing the brain does, just by a longer path.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
There were a lot of deaths. What is your standard for taking a risk seriously?
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
I mean, I don't know if that's the case, but conversely maybe the poster is only there because their ancestors stayed within the same ten mile radius for the past four generations doing roughly the same job handed down the family line. Even if not, certainly people like that exist; are their preferences invalid?
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
How is LOTR gnostic? Offhand, it doesn't seem to match your description at all.
FeepingCreature
2mo ago
Out of interest, do you think that a mars base is sci-fi? It's been discussed in science fiction for a long time.
I think any predictions about the future that assume new technology are "science fiction" p much by definition of the genre, and will resemble it for the same reason: it's the same occupation. Sci-fi that isn't just space opera ie. "fantasy in space", is inherently just prognostication with plot. Note stuff like Star Trek predicting mobile phones, or Snowcrash predicting Google Earth: "if you could do it, you would, we just can't yet."
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
The only thing I ever saw Apple commenting on is the first one. Did they say it's technically unfeasible to build a surveilable phone anywhere? Cause that's dumb.
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
The disagreement is: having made a phone that works this way, it is now technically infeasible to search it. It was not technically infeasible to build the phone another way, but Apple also never claimed that. After all, they did this deliberately, as a sales pitch.
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
Good point!
But then the point of "satanic religions of old", for a Christian, would be equivalent to saying "religions of old", surely? Because there is only one God, so every non-judaic religion is either fraudulent or satanic. Or is it "the set of religions considered demon-worshipping by the OT Israelites"?
Or is the argument more something like "LGBT has become like Molechism"?
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
No I don't think so.
It sounds like you're not saying "we know they did" but "well they would have, wouldn't they." IMO we actually cannot safely assume that at all.
I mean, they aren't? The Bible does not to my knowedge list any old religion that worships Satan. The only Satan-worshippers show up in Revelation.
Particularly for instance Moloch is not said to be identical with Satan.
Also, here's Claude Sonnet (AI):
The Israelites would more likely have seen Molech as:
- A false god (but still a distinct entity)
- A "demon" or "shedim" (as mentioned in Deuteronomy 32:17)
- Simply "an abomination"
The strong identification of pagan deities with Satan seems to have developed more in later theological traditions, particularly in Christian interpretation.
Which matches my knowledge.
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
I mean, I could turn around and say if you knew that somebody was planning something nefarious but couldn't prove it, "accidentally" releasing the passwords to the public is also a clever way to increase common knowledge of the attack vector, thus making it more likely that people will look in the right place during the investigation.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
I have no good opinion on that. I think it's a novel thing, so I can't reason about it by analogy, and I don't think it can be considered accounted for under the law in any sort of originalist reasoning or even at all. I think it's a thing where we just have to make up our minds and decide what we want from scratch.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
I think netstack literally means "not being the actual person Donald Trump".
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I don't need a scientific study to prove that fat people tend to perform worse on typical willpower tasks like "don't eat a second piece of pie, even though you want to and you know it will be bad for you."
Of course, it's then very possible that their failure is wanting it more, not resisting it less.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Hm. Does it make sense to say that society may advantage either men or women depending in part on economic conditions? In that case, it might still be the case that women are currently advantaged - and unless we expect starvation/subsistence conditions to reoccur in the west, may be sustainably advantaged.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
If twelve people agree that X and Y murdered Z and W, but they cannot by any means come to agree on whether X murdered Z and Y murdered W or converse, should they convict?
(Claude Opus says no, GPT-4 says yes.)
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Eh, at that scale, if you don't isolate the cells properly you deserve what happens.
FeepingCreature
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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."
FeepingCreature
1yr 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.
FeepingCreature
1yr 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.
There's a difference between "I think lockdowns sort of made sense" and "science says that lockdowns don't make sense." (It's that one of those gets called out on not citing sources.)
If you say "there is evidence", you're gonna have to expect people saying "well show it then."
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