FeepingCreature
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User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
10mo ago
Sometimes, if a thing is "needed" and violates the constitution, that means you still shouldn't get to have it. What's the point of principles if you only hold to them on matters that are agreeable anyways?
FeepingCreature
16d ago
About halfway through, I completely lost track of what the comment was advocating or even saying.
FeepingCreature
4mo 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
6mo ago
Please don't abuse the phrasing "listen to what people say" when you actually mean "speculate what people mean". The entire point of "take them at their word" is to take them at their literal word. If you want to use this phrase, please link a video of Greta Thunberg literally advocating Jewish genocide in those exact terms.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
I don't read this as "hey, can you relinquish your moral claim on this bike and transfer it to me" and more "hey, please relinquish your physical claim on this bike because it is immoral".
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
10mo ago
As an aside, when I mentioned I was excited about this disclosure to a deeply Blue family member, they suggested I've shifted right.
This is revolting to me. I could see myself telling a family member "Hey, it's cool you're interested in that, but note that people may perceive that as a Party X aligned topic." I couldn't see myself going "hey, being interested in that makes you party X aligned." To a family member? Do I trust them that little?
The world is full of contradictions and ambiguities. Sometimes one catches your interest and you go off to investigate it. It makes me sick that this good, healthy, praiseworthy act is apparently inseparable from political affiliation.
FeepingCreature
3mo ago
Trans-Exclusive Regular Feminist
FeepingCreature
9mo ago
On one hand I want to say that surely, being able to recognize and admit misconduct is private is better than not being able to do so, so this leak is bad. On the other hand, this is a pretty impressive level of self-delusion even so, and we do want to push back on misconduct when we become aware of it.
But I guess my synthesis would be: if the only way we have of noticing misconduct in a topic as impactful as a world-wide pandemic is a leak of private messages where the scientists involved literally admit to it, then science has much, much bigger problems than these people's misconduct.
FeepingCreature
7mo 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
11mo 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.
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
12d 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
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
18d 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
19d 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.
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!
All the nerds use old.reddit.com because new.reddit.com is fully focused on centering content rather than comments and spamming page reloads so it can show more ads. (You get like five comments per page load.) Lots of people, me included, would leave the site if old.reddit was ever turned off, it's that bad.
The Reddit app imitates new Reddit. If you want old Reddit experience on a phone, you need an unofficial app. These use the API.
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