FeepingCreature
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User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Every open-minded educated person knows the 14 words, "the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." Do they remember these words because some recluse killed a few people with mail bombs in the 80s?
Yes, I broadly think this is why they remember them. I mean - how much else of the manifesto do they remember? Maybe I'm arguing too much from my own state of mind here, but I'd wager - nothing. That one sentence is punchy without saying too much that one may disagree with in the specifics, it's universally recognizeable, and most importantly, it's spicy, in no small part because of its association with terror. This all combines to make it a memetic winner.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
Like half the point of book term limits is to allow round-robin lending. If you're swiping the book, you're defecting against the person who wants to re-loan it, but that person is defecting against the library system.
"No human being is illegal" as a phrase against "illegal immigration" is a fully general argument against calling any activity illegal.
It's a good argument against the term 'illegal immigrant', I guess, but I'm not sure if "irregular immigrant" is an improvement.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
One person says "X will never happen". Another person says something that may be interpreted as "When X happens, you bigots will deserve it." This means nothing, unless you fall to the old temptation of treating the statements of all outgroup members as being coordinated.
When One refuses to notice the existence of Another or treats you as crazy for believing that Another said something that may be considered representative, it's a mite insulting.
If you disagree with my criticism of oppression-status granting infinite moral immunity, be specific about what limiting principle you'd propose (if any).
I kind of disagree with this, yes. The limiting factor is having a chance to flourish.
Hypothetical: A guy comes into your house to murder you. He has a gun and spec-ops training; you are a keyboard warrior; he will definitely find you and murder you. The best you can hope for is maybe take him by surprise and give him some bruises. Do you hang out in broad daylight, sheepishly say "guess you caught me" and let yourself be shot? Or do you do the fucker as much damage as you can?
The game theory is this: every decision to exploit somebody exists on a margin spectrum. You are trying to extract as much benefit as possible for a given effort cost; if the other can raise the effort or lower the benefit, it incentivizes you to maybe leave them alone. But we never know where somebody's cut-off point is, so there's always an incentive, if you notice you're being fucked over, to do as much damage as you can back.
So there's a very tentative hypothetical we can construct here to advocate for Palestinean terrorism. Israel is clearly fucking them while exploiting "their" land (whether your game theory implementation advocates forgiveness or revenge here probably depends on preexisting sentiment, but revenge is at least plausible), Israel is clearly trying to minimize effort costs with Gaza, maybe if you can impose some costs on Israel, it'll push them closer to the threshold or at any rate strengthen your negotiating position. In game theory, a person who never plays 'defect' isn't an agent but a resource. Hamas chose the most damaging strategy available to them. Did it break existing compacts? Sure, but I'd presume they assumed that they could not get fucked any worse than they were. Will it work? Probably no.
Okay, cynic hat on: no, but the cost of it not working will not fall on Hamas. IMO, Israel can't really do anything (not hugely expensive) here that will hurt Hamas more than it drives recruitment. From the cynical view, Hamas and the authoritarian movement in Israel are obviously just playing Toxoplasma Tennis. B attacks A'. This enrages A! A cannot fight B, so it attacks B'. This enrages B! B also cannot (cheaply) fight A, so it attacks A', and so on. Part of the reason I don't really have a strong moral view against Hamas is that if this is an accurate model, it's obviously "cooperative" to some extent. Hamas benefits Netanyahu, and conversely. And whenever a cycle like that exists, blaming the most recent hit on whoever committed it is looking at the wrong component. It's a systemic effect. Remove Hamas, another terror group will be found. There is a gap here that allows the existence of a feedback cycle, so a feedback cycle arises. Anyway, in this particular case, the cycle might be running out of control because somebody, A or B, underestimated the damage the current serve would do, so it's unclear what happens next. But my moral view to "let's put the angry people in a cage and then send the guard away" is: a stupid game was played, and a stupid prize was won, I feel bad for the victims but not angry at the perpetrators; it's not like they were the load-bearing causal component.
To loop back: why did I say "the limiting factor is having a chance to flourish?" Well, how do you get out of a cycle like this? You find better things to do with your life. Not sure how good a life you could have in Gaza City. If you could have a good life, a dignified life, a life with authorship and respect, and then you go on a revenge bender - well, I am a humanist, I want to maximize flourishing. When people live an unworthy life, I welcome attempts to, even counterfactually, push for a better life; when people could already live a worthy life, I don't. Do I think Gazans lack the capability to live a worthwhile life? I don't know, honestly, but if I wanted to construct a moral case for terrorism, that's where I'd start.
Addendum: When this conflict started, I said to a family member: "I don't think what Hamas did was right, but I am willing to bet on two things: at the end of this, a lot more Palestineans will have died than Israelis; and at the end of this, Hamas will still be there." If Israel wants to convince me that I'm wrong about the Toxoplasma Tennis thing, those are the two factors they should try to improve.
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
No because Trump is an outlier. Trump-style populism relies on his charisma; it's not replicable at scale. Not even Trump could build a machine that produces Trumps; and his party is not interested in doing so at any rate.
FeepingCreature
1yr 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
1yr ago
But in this case, the moral harm entirely comes from the reaction of her social circle, no? She has to lie that he raped her to protect her reputation. It sounds to me like her peergroup is the problem here, not the sex. It sounds like the problem isn't "open sex-positive norms", but "trying to live sex-positive norms while actually in a very sex-negative environment."
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
A hilarious note about Bing: When it gets a search results it disagrees with, it may straight up disregard it and just tell you "According to this page, <what Bing knows to be right rather than what it read there>".
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
Or as we call it in the dystopian future, banned for spamming.
FeepingCreature
3mo ago
There was never a need for a "casus belli", Trump can just do things. He can just ignore the supreme court. What's supposed to keep the country working is not "presidents don't assume dictatorial powers" but "the other organs stop him". This will simply be an opportunity to discover if it works.
It's so weird to me, because it's like a minimum coup. Not even a minimum viable coup, because it clearly isn't. It's not doing your enemy a small injury, it's like slapping your enemy in the face with the broad of your sword, then running away. Are you trying to start shit or not? It's like they themselves didn't know if they wanted to start shit or not. Like a child's drawing of a coup: all the parts are there, the march, the violence, the fraudulent scheme, but they're just executed with zero skill or coherence, basically at random. I think that's why it causes so much division. It's like your neighboring country rolls a tank over the border, but it's made of cardboard, plops out one sad shell and falls apart. Now you don't even know if you're supposed to be at war.
It's a coup done by a person who just doesn't know how to do one. So do you let it count?
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
Conversely, if Kamala wins, does that mean you underestimated the power of Orange Man Bad?
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
Yeah but messing with the dominant search index of the country to censor certain topics is pretty much as close to "he who controls the present controls the past" as a company can get. So does the Dalle diversity scandal for that matter.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
The thing is, if it's not the case, we have to consider that SpaceX is putting down more launches than the rest of the market put together as some sort of stunt or fraud, which starts to edge into conspiracy theory. Either Musk is a machiavellian genius running a massive misinformation campaign using billion dollars of hardware, or F9 launches are profitable and more launches are more profitable, which would explain why SpaceX literally started a separate company to justify being able to make more launches.
FeepingCreature
1yr 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
2yr ago
I expect AI to reduce safetyism because safetyism is, optimistically, a result of uncertainty and miscommunication. If you have poor eyesight, you wear glasses; if you have poor hearing, you wear a hearing-aid. My expectation is that many to most people will opt into prosthetics that give them improved social cognition: a feeling, in advance, for how something you're intending to say will be received. Alternatively, you can literally get the AI to translate vernacular, sentiment and idioms; this will be useful when leaving your peergroup. Furthermore, it will be much easier to stay up to date on shibboleths or to judge cultural fit in advance.
Humanity suffers from a massive lack of competence on every axis imaginable. We cannot now imagine how nice the post-singularity will be, but for a floor consider a world where everyone is good at everything at will, including every social skill.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
my only runtime error messages were just segmentation fault.
gdb --args !!
You can even set the SIGSEGV handler to automatically attach gdb to the running program.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
digg and tumblr died because, as in the meme, they shoved a stick in their own spokes. There needs to be alternative stuff available, but there is also often a sudden shock: with digg the atrocious frontpage redesign, with tumblr the porn ban. (With LessWrong the end of Eliezer's posts...)
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
I mean, I'm not proposing a model but an empirical observation. If the Republican machine could replicate trump to replace him they would have, considering how much they dislike him.
I don't think that "charisma matters in politics" is news. Plenty of American presidents have had mass appeal, just for instance Obama. But the Dems cannot produce Obamas anymore than the Reps can produce Trumps. If that's solved -- sure, but there's no reason to me to think that Trump moves us closer to solving it. American politics has had centuries to codify charisma and hasn't managed to do more than come across it in the wild.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I mean, I think this is overly simplistic. Did some people aim intentionally for genocide back then? Sure, probably. Did some people aim, agitate, and advocate for uplift? It seems like this was also the case, hence schools and churches. And of course, the natives as labor force is and has always been among the resources being exploited, where it could be, and this can also explain the schools. Iunno, I don't think you're wrong, per se, I just don't think any single strategy can explain colonialism, being as it was an emergent venture prosecuted by many interest groups. I'd expect most things that were done to fulfill multiple interests.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
I don't think the interns were put there as a last-ditch motivation attempt for otherwise-NEETs.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
As a European, this is half the reason I'm in favor of us supporting Ukraine.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
Aliens make no sense because the stars still shine. I would not expect the greatest visible evidence for aliens to be on Earth, I would expect it to be humanity surrounded by Dyson spheres. (If I was a civilization that got post-singularity, I would totally eat every sun.) The idea that the strongest visible evidence for alien life is found in Earth's atmosphere simply does not pass any smell test.
Most people are not nationally important, and lawsuits are expensive.
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