FeepingCreature
No bio...
User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
18d 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
6mo 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
11mo 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
1yr ago
Or as we call it in the dystopian future, banned for spamming.
FeepingCreature
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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 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
10mo ago
I don't think the interns were put there as a last-ditch motivation attempt for otherwise-NEETs.
FeepingCreature
10mo ago
As a European, this is half the reason I'm in favor of us supporting Ukraine.
FeepingCreature
10mo 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.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
I don't think anybody was expecting ChatGPT to cheat the system like that. GPT-3 and GPT-4 aren't interesting because they're superintelligences, they're interesting because they seem to represent critical progress on the path to one.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I see no reason why biochemistry should not be able to produce consciousness, agency, thought and qualia. In the modus-ponens-modus tollens sense: "clearly they can, because they do." Where is the actual contradiction?
Don't multiply entities beyond necessity. Clearly brains have something to do with qualia. Why not "A causes B"? Why should I look beyond this intuitively obvious structure?
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I think you're viewing this as "A says they have rights to B's body", whereas parent is viewing it as "C is saying they have the right to prevent what A and B want to do with their bodies."
This showed up in the "TheMotte needs your help" poll.
I was forced to declare it "neutral" because "high standard of evidence while politely catfighting another poster; this entire thread should be nuked; what the fuck are the mods doing" was sadly not available.
I'm genuinely not sure how I'm supposed to rate comments like this. It's hostile speculation about another poster's state of mind, in a thread that seems entirely dedicated to fighting out Dean and ymeshkout's mutual antagonism by consent of a good fraction of the board. It's like everyone's decided "screw the rules, we're turning this thread into a fighting ring." I would say "deserves a warning", but nobody here doesn't, this comment included, and it doesn't particularly deserve a warning more.
I would like to request a "Nuke this entire thread from orbit" poll option. There's a level of mess where opping individual comments simply isn't viable.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Conversely, costly signalling: look how smart we are even with these drawbacks!
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
We Will Rock You has to at least be on the list, for sheer "absolutely everybody has heard this song" alone.
It is impossible to set that beat in a communal setting and not have people 1. join in 2. get pumped.
On the other hand, the opening is the strongest part.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Have you read Scott's Who By Very Slow Decay? When your remaining lifespan is expected negative value, suicide is sane.
FeepingCreature
24d 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
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
1yr ago
I am fundamentally against companies upholding moral values. I think it's a societal declaration of bankruptcy and corrosive to democracy, and I think it should be outlawed. I want my companies to be amoral profit-maximizers. This idea we have that we can tame companies when we already have a nice, central mechanism for arbitrating moral questions (elections, rule of law) just ends up recreating democracy but worse in every way: less equal, less regulated, less principled, less consistent, more corrupt, more vulnerable to extremism, and so on.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I'd be fascinated to know how men-smart (spatial) the average woman is, and how women-smart (verbal) the average man is.
Also to what degree each correlates to the positive traits IQ is usually held to be associated with (health, income, etc.)
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I think vaccinations are good, but sadly there's no vaccination for tribalism and hysteria. From what you're describing what happened to you has less to do with vax vs antivax on the medical merits and everything with vaccination the memeplex. Which tbf the government is only limitedly responsible for. I think you're mixing up a bunch of different causes and effects that are only topically related.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
The notion that some kid with PTSD is in the same boat as a decaying immobile nonagenarian amputee is beyond absurd.
There are people who assert that suicide is always wrong. I think this argument is "haggling over the price."
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.
More options
Context Copy link