FeepingCreature
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User ID: 311
You think these are the core defining traits of the Holocaust? Not, say, the mass murder?
If Hitler had put Jews, invalids, gypsies and various dissidents in camps and then kept and fed them until the end of the war, we would be ... very confused, morally, for one, considering what other claims he made, but we'd probably have a different view on Nazis. Depending whether he'd used them for labor, we may even consider the camps "relatively humane" as far as camps go. Certainly they wouldn't be considered synonymous with absolute evil.
"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
9mo ago
For most of human history, this has been the case.
Sure, but what's their concept of heaven? More labor? No, a rest from having to do labor all the time. "Not enjoying it and wishing it would stop" is pretty much the defining difference between labor and fun. I don't think anybody's ever invented a wageslave heaven. (Maybe the Chinese...?)
I'm not saying the work shouldn't be done. I'm just drawing a difference between work as an instrumental and terminal goal: in fact, "instrumental goal" is also a pretty good synonym of labor.
People live embedded in communities. They live within a context of other human beings that you can never completely and permanently isolate themselves from.
I mean, I don't think constructing social necessity is particularly hard. If we find we want, terminally, for there to be socially useful labor (even aside how we're pretty alienated from the fruits of our labor in our current society, something something letterbombs), I don't think that's going to be hard to arrange even in the absence of any true environmentally-imposed scarcity. But note that now we're looking at labor as a terminal goal. So that's what I'd argue: all non-terminal labor should be abolished - not in the sense of just not doing it, but in the sense of not having to do it.
FeepingCreature
10mo ago
But by those rules as you described it, wouldn't then the president taking stuff home be considered spillage in the same logic? Ie. from himself to himself? Then because - because - the president doesn't have clearance to own it anymore, he might actually paradoxically be in the clear to pass it on to journalists?
Like, he now has classified information, but he's not "forwarding classified information" because he's not in a position where he has special authority over classified information to begin with. It's just like a journalist passing a leak to another journalist. And when he had the authority to possess it, he spilled it, but that can't be a crime because, well, he had the authority to do that then. So in the journalist analogy, the president basically acts as both leaker and releaser at different points in time.
If non vaccinated, or positives covid tested individuals and families had been shipped off to camps (outside china), and had been killed would that really have been incongruent with the rhetoric and propoganda deployed?
I obviously cannot prove this, but my immediate reaction is "yes, of course, massively incongruent."
We'd need more samples. I was right this time, but obviously n=1.
I think even in China, you could predict fairly reliably if a given camp or campaign was going to engage in mass murder or not, ie. whether the Uighur rhetoric is like the Nazi rhetoric in ways that the Covid rhetoric is not. To be clear, I don't have an opinion on this; I haven't done any research on genocide in China, but I'd expect if there was genocide we should see commonalities in the rhetoric.
edit: Ie. say, nobody was calling Covid victims dangerous parasites.... Okay, I'm not willing to say that. Maybe it's just that the US CW is so hot that the rhetoric on the street was genuinely indistinguishable from Mein Kampf? If so, Scott may be apropos: "Stop telling people they’re going to be killed. ... Stop trying to convince Americans that all the other Americans hate them."
I don't think the epistemic position is the same.
It's not that I, as a pro-lockdown person, abetted and ignored the possible genocide of Covid infectees, it's that I had a very strong positive expectation that there would not be a genocide or even a significant mass murder. (And, you know, I was right.) I don't think that can be said for people who supported the Nazi regime.
FeepingCreature
15d ago
Eh, at that scale, if you don't isolate the cells properly you deserve what happens.
FeepingCreature
16d 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
18d 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
19d 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
20d 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
21d 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
24d 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.
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
25d 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
1mo 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
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.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
My argument was merely that it seems implausible to me that whatever we mean by suffering, the correct generalization of it is that systems built from neurons can suffer whereas systems built from integrated circuits, definitionally, can not.
FeepingCreature
3mo ago
I disagree that it's too fast, and I would submit that making it 2x on YouTube doesn't make it better is an argument for it. This is music that is intended for that speed, not speed purely for speed's sake.
FeepingCreature
3mo ago
AIUI technically speaking you have conditional probabilities, but that's not quite a "likelihood of having a likelihood" but "a likelihood given a precondition event which also has a likelihood".
FeepingCreature
4mo ago
Speak for yourself, I intend to run millions of forks.
I mean sure, and you'd say "well all altruism is effective, everyone is genuinely trying to help out as well as they can," I just simply don't think that's the case at all. EA as a name is an implicit insult to non-E A - and the insult is ... kinda deserved. Rationality, or rational fiction, have the same issue. As Max0r said in his DOOM Eternal review, regarding the tightly focused combat system:
"But Max0r," I hear you thinking. "That's every game ever!" Yes! Every good game ever.
A tight focus on effectiveness can assume a quality of its own - that sort of behavior can be surprisingly rare. Especially if everyone finds it too awkward to consider or admit that quality differences, possibly massive differences, exist.
FeepingCreature
4mo ago
As a person who gets knotted up about paperclip maximizers, let me just note here for future reference that we were always EA. You can find "effective charities for AI" all the way back in the early GiveWell recommendations. Mosquito nets is what we recommend to those strange people who for some reason don't see the pending apocalypse coming.
And of course, since you're giving me such a perfect setup:
so what, all lives are being saved here exactly?
Exactly. :P
FeepingCreature
5mo ago
That seems unrelated: there's a difference between a partner and a victim.
This is funny to me because Christians have been and still are guilty of doing all of those things: cut off parts of genitals, "sterilization", and IMO teaching eternal punishment in hell is at least as bad as convincing them their parents are trying to commit genocide.
And of course the child grooming.
A secular humanist could maybe make this argument. A christian should attend to the beam in their own eye.
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