The actual "utility numbers" come about from the fact that we always have some kind of preference between 2 hypothetical futures.
I'm pretty sure this isn't true. Human minds don't run on integer math, and neither do they run on pure rationality, and neither are they very good at modelling future states. I'm pretty sure it's easy to get people to express preference loops, where they rank their preferences as a > b > c > a, for example.
I was not making the stronger psychology claim that a good model of human behaviour is to assume that everyone is maximising E[u] for some personal utility function (but I am claiming that this would be the best way for an agent to operate if it had oo computational power)
When I spoke of the utility numbers, I was referring to them existing as an abstract concept, which may be totally unknown to any human mind (similarly, the 10^100th digit of pi also exists) - it's just that they can, in principle, be calculated.
Your example of people "having" preference loops (scare quotes because it might just be self-deception) just falls under humans sometimes being wrong about stuff. We don't need to reject arithmetic because I said "2+2=5".
Do you agree that utility functions exist in the abstract? (I agree they are often unhelpful to reason about things in practice, and sometimes they can be an intentional overcomplication to trick people)
It makes you reliable, which makes you attractive in several senses of the word, which helps build a "we" to keep you out of such situations in the first place
I think you're right - and I didn't consider this initially since, in my case, I don't think I have anyone in my community who would reward such behaviour. But if you do have strong bonds with precommiters, it makes sense for you to act this way.
What assurance do they have of the King's honesty?
They don't have an assurance, but in my experience interacting with people, being nice and apologetic (even if the other person is in the wrong) can only make them less mad (even if they are still mad) - I would apologise to the king because maybe he would be content with having humiliated me and leave me alone (or maybe he might just kill me without being tortured - which I would value massively)
And even if he is honest, what are the remaining span of their lives worth? Even in terms of pleasure, what are they worth, compared to the pleasure of spite satisfied? What the king wants, he will never have
Well, this is kind of my problem with this Hylynkian philosophy. As I conceded, it makes sense for you to adopt this kind of attitude as a shared culture with your ingroup. You should stand up to unfairness because otherwise you'll be seen as cowardly.
But on an individual level (my friends are also non-Hlynkians) - if I keep spiting the various kings I encounter in life, I'll just keep running into trouble and it will add up and make my life worse than it would be otherwise. Isn't it better to focus on our own happiness than to try and punish people who do bad things? If I literally had no control over anything else, I would want to spite the king, but in practice (even in this example as I said above) - we can usually significantly lessen the chance of us getting in trouble if we just swallow our pride (e.g. when someone in real life who isn't a close friend or family says that what I just said is offensive, I just apologise instead of pushing the point)
and it is fitting that the cruel should suffer for their evil, that the scales should move toward balance in all possible ways.
I fully understand this impulse (and have felt it myself!), but I think this is an immoral view to hold, and we should try and repress this desire. I will elaborate.
I think that suffering is always a bad thing, no matter how bad the entity is that is suffering. Of course in practice, for instance with criminals, we sometimes have to make them suffer (to alleviate the suffering of their future victims), and since they can so easily opt out of the suffering the state imposes on them by not comitting crimes, I am okay with making them suffer prison/execution (and I don't advocate for making jail cells into fancy hotel rooms, because if there is the money to do that - it should be spent on the non-criminal public)
But if we weren't constrained by resources (or we were in a situation as you describe, where the suffering is not a means to an end, but the end itself) - I would not want anyone to suffer. In this story (it's a lot longer than Heather Ale, but I think it helps convey the "emotion" behind the "suffering is always bad" worldview, like HA does for precomittment), I find the serial killer sickening, and it feels like he should atone for his wrong-doing... but why? His victims are already dead, and no one will see what happens to him, so there is no use in "making an example" - isn't it just "better" if he goes to heaven? (And then you feel even more sick when you imagine if you were one of the victims, but the logic still holds!)
(unless you're attuned to what seems to be tacitly acknowledged to be a genuine racial dog-whistle)
To my awareness, there is no racist meme in which you list someone's name and just say "oh". If we are really reaching, I suppose this falls into the general paradigm of "Noticing" (that would be a dogwhistle, since it's just a normal word that has a secret related meaning that was arbitrarily assigned to it to allow for people to make controversial statements that sound innocuous to someone unaware)
There is no shared context you are missing here. Just the common context we all have from living on the same planet.
Maybe I have to brush up on my linguistics, but I still don't see any notable connection between that name and any region, let alone any political stance.
There probably is a way that a linguist could deduce much more than just him being Black from the name alone, and there's probably also some jargon that could help precisely describe what about the name "sounds SSA". (If I think about it a bit, I suppose the consecutive consonants "Nt" in particular sound SSA)
But we do not need any advanced linguistic machinery to make this inference in this case, anymore than someone needs to understand General Relavity (or even Newtonian gravity) to infer that if I let go of an object in mid-air, it will fall to the ground.
I had the same reaction as @EverythingIsFine
As I said, I don't think this is really the reaction any of you had to the comment. Charitably, I think that you feel this way consciously, because you dislike racism, and so you avoided letting your mind make this hard-to-explicitly-articulate, but obvious inference.
I guess I'm also being a little obtuse here though. I think what you guys are getting at, is that it is unfair to make an inference based on the professor's race, as opposed to his work, because he has no control over the former. If he doesn't want people to assume he hates White people on the basis of his work, he can try and address this by softening the tone, or even reconsidering the substance - but if someone assumes things about him because of his race... what is he to do? It's not like he can stop being Black.
And I agree (at least from the perspective of the person who is being discriminated against) it is really unfair and sucky to be judged on the basis of something entirely beyond your control and decided at birth (whether that is your race, sex, disability, etc) - and on this basis, you can make an argument that, as a society, we should uphold this tacit norm where we avoid acting on, or even openly acknowledging, the information given by these characteristics (and instead wait for them to tell about their nature through their behaviour)
But this is a pseudononymous internet forum whose principle goal is truth-seeking (or at least acknowleding the truth when presented before us), even when said truth is offensive, hurtful or upsetting. So even if we want to maintain the "no-Noticing" social norm for society (I have mixed feelings about that), I strongly disagree that we should do that here, because it prevents us from seeing the true nature of reality.
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
No, physical possession does not entail deprivation
Wait, what? Then how are you defining the word "deprivation"? Surely, if I am using an object, I am not allowing others to use the object at the same time, i.e. I am depriving them of the ability to use the object.
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
So kill them? That's what you mean, right?
I think this is uncharitable. I assume he just wants to dispossess the "elite parasite class" of their land and assets (and redistribute them to poor people), and then convince them of the error of their ways (if you hold his worldview, then they will just understand how much better it is to share once we let them see what a society unshackled from the notion of "ownership" looks like)
Because people have tried this, and it didn't become "clear" what remained to be done except continue killing until you run out of people to steal from, limp on in totalitarian misery and eventually give up.
I think this is what would happen in practice if OP's idea of abolishing ownership was actually implemented. But I don't think this is his intent, I think he just has a different model of human nature and societies than we do (if I don't believe in germs and I sneeze on my immunocompromised friend, and he dies, that doesn't mean I wanted to kill him, or had any kind of malicious intent towards him)
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
I don't think so, no. Utilitarian calculus breaks down with infinites, and this is about infinites
The actual "utility numbers" come about from the fact that we always have some kind of preference between 2 hypothetical futures. And we could effectively encode the idea of -oo utility by just making all these "above utilitarian calculus" things be -10^10^10^10 utilons (and having the mundane and tangible be on the scale of 10s of utilons)
But I suppose this is kind of a nitpicky point (you may as well do "calculations" by treating the idea of liberty as something with its own calculus if the numbers cannot overlap) - so it's just a matter of perspective if you want to see it as a utility thing or not. I'm happy to not use the utilitarian lens here - I'm just trying to point out that it can be seen though this lens in principle (like how, technically, any maths proof could be formalised into Lean, even though this is usually unnecessary and impractical)
It's well-known that small compromises lead to larger ones, and it is in this fashion that one moves from compromising to being compromised
But what can you do in situations where you have no leverage over the compromising party? What is there to do other than give them whatever they want, and hope they will slightly nicer to you (even if "nicer" just means taking all of stuff instead of torturing you to death and then taking all your stuff)?
I know what you suggest - which is to stubbornly refuse like the Picts in your poem, and get tortured to death. What does this achieve (the King presumably just doesn't care, so he won't abdicate the throne or anything)? These principles Hlynka proposes only seems to bring misery and suffering to it adherents in these sorts of extreme situations.
Precommitment, in other words, the most durable sort of commitment. And such commitments are often decisive, especially in a crisis
[Heather Ale poem]
I understand this as a strategy, and I think it even makes sense in various real-world cases (e.g. MAD with nuclear weapons) where you have a reasonable chance of overcoming your adversary (I'm not a pacifist - I don't think a nation should just lie down and accept being conquered if a similarly-powered neighbour invades them, for example)
But in the situation of you acting as an individual, against an entire government, I don't see what good precommitment will do. You have no threats or leverage over the person violating your rights. The "Heather Ale" poem is basically my point - the dwarfs died (and the father was presumably horribly tortured too) , and that was the intended outcome of the father's "trick". I agree in this sort of situation, it's very unlikely that the king will just let the dwarf family live happily ever after once they give up the secret, he'll probably keep escalating his demands. But we don't just how far he will go yet - why not give in for now, and if things actually get really bad, the dwarfs can just kill themselves? (killing themselves now just closes options)
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
I really need the money, too. Maybe even more than you do. So, where does that leave us?
We don't even need to use hypotheticals as @sarker did. There are people all over the world who need your money more than you do (you could save a child's life with a malaria pill for just 1 dollar)
There are various reasonable arguments for why you deserve the money more than these children do, but I strongly suspect you don't believe in any of them (but I'd be happy and surprised to be proven wrong!)
So why aren't you donating all of your money to save these lives? What gives you the right to, in your own framing, "deprive" all these sick, unfortunate children of urgent medical care? Even if you totally bankrupt yourself, you could go on welfare or just be homeless and live off the kindness of strangers (you'd still be better off than all those children)
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
How can you detach from yourself to form an attachment that could be construed as "owning" yourself? It's just a figure of speech that doesn't correspond to the reality of the matter
I guess this becomes dicey when we get close to the brain. But certainly a person exists detatched from their limbs (is amputation death?)
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
We all know how to share. It's one of the first things we were taught. I don't have a private definition for it.
I think I understand intuitively what you're trying to get at - e.g. why not let a billionaire share his summer house with homeless people? (Is this the kind of scenario you have in mind?)
Are you trying to propose a system where people are obligated to share stuff they aren't using? (so in the system, I don't have to "share" my computer, coffee mug, or charger, since I'm using them now - but I should share my electric cooker with someone else because I'm not using it now)
If so, do you not think there's value in having "right of access" 24/7 for various items? In my case, I like the fact that my books, my bed, my crockery, etc are all "on retainer" to be used whenever I want. Whereas if I had to share them all the time, it would cost me utility. Is there nothing that you "own" (I know you are against this concept, but I mean in the sense that society believes that you own it) which you don't like having unfettered access to?
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
I view inheritance as part of meritocracy. If you have an inheritance, excluding adoptees, chances are high that your parents are some variety of high-quality stock and you will be too.
I agree that the practice of inheritance is eugenic. And it is probably going to make a better society than a pure meritocracy where everyone is raised by the state starting with no assets (will people still be motivated to make the enormously outsized contributions that make a billionaire, if they cannot pass it down or take it with them?)
But the point of the word "meritocracy" is distill the concept of rewarding people for their individual accomplishments, and explicitly avoiding rewarding them for "higher order" traits (parents, race, sex, age, disability, etc) that correlate well with actual useful contributions and achievements (growing a company, solving an open problem in maths, constructing a house, etc)
If you, the inheritor, are not well adapted to present conditions then you’ll lose all the money and it makes its way to everyone else anyways.
"Well-adapted" is a spectrum. Yes, if the inheritor is a total moron, he will throw away everything passed down on gambling, drugs and alcohol. And if the inheritor is as competent as the progenitor, they will preserve all the wealth. Somewhere in between these levels of adaptedness, there is someone who would not be able to create a large amount of wealth for themselves, but could preserve it.
If you really don't give someone any advantage from an inheritance, then people wouldn't go to such lengths to give their children inheritances.
I consider that there would actually be a lot more meritocracy if there was an effective way to keep coffin-dodgers from spending down most of their children’s inheritance just to hang on to another 4 or 5 years of rapidly decreasing life value. I also reserve blame about this for descendants who are unwilling to just let Mom and Pop die with some dignity.
If you just replaced the word "meritocracy" with something like "utility" or "a better society", I would agree.
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
Both of those statements are true, and are just different ways of framing the same thing. I would say you "gave me your car" because I am fine with the fact that ownership involves depriving other people of an object. If I were OP, it would make sense to frame it you "ceasing to deprive me" because I would abhor what I see as a backwards, oppressive social construct.
Normal people absolutely do use this double-negative framing for more controversial issues. For example a leftist might describe the state not giving someone asylum (Article 14), denying a transgender person gender-affirming healthcare ("trans rights are human rights") as "depriving them of their human rights". I can't give any (mainstream) right wing examples, because standard conservative/libertarian ideology believes that there is a meaningful distinction between "positive and negative rights", and that people are only entitled to negative rights (a conservative would view e.g. free speech as different to the above examples - a state does not "deprive" someone of their right to free speech, because infringing on someone's right to free speech requires them making a positive action to repress them - instead of just passively not giving them something they want)
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
My honest first reaction was simply what I said: “is this guy supposed to be famous or is there some in-group reference I’m missing?”
You're saying that you didn't think to yourself - "that sounds like a Black man" (even given that the topic of the OP was DEI in the US, a practice that heavily rewards Black people)?
Even linking his faculty page like you did would have been a more effective point and IMO a valid comment. In fact, pointing him out as someone with an obvious career stake and bias towards finding bias IS a good point.
Sure, but that is an additional point, going beyond the original comment. The point of the original comment is just to point out that the author is Black - we can infer he has a particular bias towards finding bias because he is a Black intellectual (so the alternatives to systemic racism would be especially unflattering to him) - Magus' point still makes sense even if we couldn't see any of his works/publications.
You might believe that judging him on his race is morally or factually wrong. But I don't think that expressing such beliefs should count as a rules violation if done plainly and in a calm tone, so while this comment is rule-breaking, the implied point should still be expressible on the forum (e.g. if Magus had explicitly said "the author is Black"), without having to add further justifications and context about his career choices, publications, etc
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
... it's clearly not standard and obviously not how [CONCEPT] normally works
Sure, but that doesn't a priori mean it's a bad idea. A lot of the most useful things in rationalism involve taking a normal word, and making a better, non-standard definition that fits better to a coherent concept (e.g. "belief" is just a predictive model of the world)
Do I deprive you of my car? Does my mother-in-law deprive you of the vegetables she grows in her garden? Does my landlord deprive me of the apartment I rent? Do I deprive my employer of the wages I earn? Does a customer deprive a store of the products he buys? Does a hunter-gatherer in a jungle at the other end of the world deprive me of some berries and a squirrel? Do you deprive me of the device you use to post here?
Yes, to all of the above. Not just if we assume OP's worldview, but just in the normal sense of the word - all of these are examples of OP (and me) being deprived of something.
But, under the way the world currently works, these are all things that the respective parties are allowed to deprive OP of.
This is ass-backwards.
I think OP is wrong in wanting to change the system, and also in describing the right to deprive others as the "essential" part of the concept of ownership. But he is right that ownership of X is fully encapsulated by the notion of "having the right to not let others use X".
I just think this falls under the general pattern where people attempt to pathologise normal, functional things by "deconstructing" them and describing them in bizarre, but technically accurate ways ("marriage is a way for a man to control a woman's body", "capitalism is a system where billionaires spend millions on yachts whilst homeless people freeze to death on the streets", "we live in a Eurocentric, cisheteronormative society", "jail is society locking human beings up in cages")
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
the proper way to begin one's political reasoning from: not what you are willing to kill for, but what are you willing to die for
Both of these feel like a strange and arbitrary place to start my political reasoning from (I would start from "what does my Utopia look like?", and then see how close we can practically get to that Utopia when constrained by the laws of physical reality and conflict theory)
But it's a reasonable question anyways, so I'll answer it. I am indeed willing to die for some things, examples off the top of my head:
- To save the life of my own child that survived past infancy
- To save the life of the mother of any of any of my children that survived past infancy
- To avoid a credible threat of being tortured to death
- I would kill myself if I was very sure that nothing was left except pain and misery (e.g. if I had some incurable terminal illness and 3 months to live)
What comes above utilitarian calculus?
But doesn't all of this just fit neatly into utilitarian calculus? If you just assign utility -N for your own death, then if you are willing to die for X, that just corresponds to ~X having a utility -M < -N. I'm not pretending to be some genius rationalist robot man who calculates everything in utilons to make decisions, but the idea of utilitarian calculus is just that all of the rational (in the weak sense, where we don't use logic that leads to contradictions) decisions an agent can make boil down to maximising some utility function (or in practice, a protocol that approximates this maximisation)
in the thought experiment, you will let yourself be shot in the head, instead of capitulating?
Seriously? You're saying if some dictator came into power, and tries to violate your rights (even if you don't even care that much about the object-level thing - like literally just clenching your fists), then you would just steel yourself up, and deny him. That you wouldn't back down - even as the situation escalates to the point where some agent of the state is literally holding a gun to your head? In this situation, you'd just grit your teeth, look your executioner in the eye with righteous anger, and be "nobly" shot in the head - not to avoid even mild physical suffering, or to protect the life of a loved one - but literally just because you've decided that freedom "comes above the utilitarian calculus"?
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
This gets to why having a framework of ownership, and via ownership exclusion is useful!
I agree with your point about ownership, and generally just being allowed to "control your own body" being a useful social construct in most cases. I just disagree with your claim that it is some kind of elegant "natural" law, because actually we all live in a shared reality and all of our actions effect other people, and vice-versa (but often the externalities are so negligible, we can just use the approximation of "live and let live" - e.g. pseudononymous users arguing about politically incorrect topics on an obscure web forum)
Nudists can have spaces where they are nude all day and they can exclude prudes who would be upset by this. Everyone else can have spaces where they exclude nudists.
How do you interpret the nudists not being allowed in public spaces? Is it that you see the public spaces as being owned by the government, so it is the government's right in this case (not as specially privileged actors, but just as the group that happens to own this particular space) to exclude the nudists?
(If that is what you think, can we not just remove people's rights in practice by using the loophole of "excluding" everyone who does(n't) do X from using any kind of public space - "let the transphobes/communists/Catholics construct their own parallel society, without any help from the existing one of course, where they can be transphobic/communist/Catholic all day long")
We've already seen that its possible to exclude people on basis of vaccination status.
But do you think this is morally okay? (why can't the anti-vaxxers "control their own body"?)
Likewise, you can exclude people with 'ugly' tattoos or require them to cover up (but now you've smuggled in the topic of aesthetics which, hoo boy).
From public? I haven't heard of any such laws, not even laws requiring people to cover up tattoos in public (I've certainly seen people walking around with tatoos!)
I didn't mean to smuggle in aesthetics. But even if we allow for the sillier tattoos as having some kind of artistic value, I can think of deliberately shocking and obscene tattoos that I think almost everyone would find "ugly", in the sense it would upset them to see it (perhaps a hyperrealistic image of a penis being split apart by a modified pear of anguish in the urethra)
"Society" can be built on a framework of people agreeing to respect property boundaries and agreeing to abide by rules set by the owners under penalty of exclusion.
It can (it could also be built on a framework of "equality of outcomes", or "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need, or even "we should minimise suffering, so we should sterilise everyone and start encouraging people to OD on heroine), but why? I don't see how this framework handles anti-social behaviour that harms society as a whole (like not vaccinating yourself, loitering in public spaces, public nudity, public drug use, etc)
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
I actually know full well that at least I am capable of not capitulating to threats
I don't understand - are you saying that in the thought experiment, you will let yourself be shot in the head, instead of capitulating? And that during COVID you actually didn't follow the rules about distancing, masks, vaccines, etc? (didn't you get in trouble?)
... it's actually slightly less crazy than what many governments in the world tried to do to their citizens
I understand you hold some kind of libertarian principles that make you respond negatively to such acts of government coercion. But surely you are exaggerating here? At least in the COVID case, there was a supposed benefit for this restriction of rights (but in the fist closing example - it is literally just a gangster being drunk on his own power)
But you wanted to paint the people who refused to capitulate to the abrogation of their bodily autonomy as the ones harming society.
So, in the specific case of COVID, I weakly believe that the government response (at least in the UK/US) was disproportionate to the actual severity of the pandemic. I haven't done any research or calculations here, this is just a hunch based on my lived experience (but given your comment, I think you agree with this point, so I'm happy to go along with this premise)
But this is a more general discussion about the principle of bodily autonomy, and in the general case it just seems straightforwardly true that an anti-vaxxer would be harming society. If there is a disease that really is sufficiently deadly (i.e. the mortality rate outweighs the major inconveniences to the entire population of mandatory vaccines, lockdowns, etc), and there is a vaccine that is sufficiently safe and effective - then yes, the government should vaccinate people against this illness (and if they refuse, they should be met with escalating consequences that eventually peak in their death, as is the case for any other illegal activity)
Given what you wrote, I assume you are against the mandatory vaccination purely on the liberatarian principle of bodily autonomy. I agree with you that the feeling of freedom is a good thing, that we all want to have. But I think, like all other good things, it is just N utility points (and N is on a scale of more mundane things, like being able to have a delicious meal each day, or being exposed to lots of sunlight and fresh air), and can just be traded for other kinds of utility. Do you disagree with this? (Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I get the impression that libertarians, and sometimes also normiecons, view "liberty" as something kind of sacred, that is incomparable to other kinds of good things, e.g. New Hampshire's motto)
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
Or, if I'm particularly brave or foolhardy, they don't.
Then what.
Well, then you get killed by the gangster, so in this formulation you maintain "ownership" of your body (at least before you die, then they control it)
And also most people (like me, and I think, in practice, you too) would just close their fist, despite the gangster not having to put much more effort into it than you would - which violates your principle of "I own my body, and I can exclude you from control of it, as a pure matter of fact, for all practical purposes."
But isn't it just WAY SIMPLER for us to agree "yeah I control my body, you control yours" without overphilosiphizing it.
For your contrived example, yes. In practice, there is just no incentive for anyone to threaten deadly violence to make someone close their fist. And I'm happy to accept that everyone has the negative right not to have their fist closed without consent.
But if we are going to step out of philisophical thought experiments, then "yeah I control my body, you control yours" is not really that simple. There are a lot of non-silly situations where someone is just, on an intuitive level, "controlling their body", and in doing so causing harm to society:
- Refusing to be vaccinated
- Loitering in public spaces
- Public nudity
- Making a political speech to a large crowd that advances an ideology that worsens society
- Getting visible tattoos that look ugly
I'm sure you would be happy to just allow people to do many of the things on my list, but I disagree that it is some obvious "easy, fundamental, universal concept" that no reasonable person could oppose, on the level of, say, "not torturing people to death because you like to hear them scream"
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
If I have fewer 'steps' to take between the signal I send and the event that occurs, you're surely going to agree that I have 'more' control over that event, no?
The number of "steps" isn't a well-defined concept (if I go into arbitrarily fine detail about the mechanism of a human body I can extend you "having my brain send a signal down my arm" into infinity steps) - I think the only coherent thing this idea corresponds to is how easy it is for you do it.
But there are systems where someone other than yourself could make you close your fists with just the effort of sending brain signals to their voice-box and jaw to speak. They could be a very powerful dictator or gangster, with an established history of extreme and brutal violence, and just order you to do it, or else.
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
- Usurp rights over resources (physical or intellectual, materials or people or property) by fiat and, if necessary, by fraud and/or force
- Kidnap (abduct) said resources (e.g., put them into captive situations with no alternative)
- Hold hostage
- Demand ransom
- Release upon payment
This description of Capitalism applies to middle-men (e.g. quant traders, supermarkets, etc) - but it doesn't seem to fit the central example of a business: where it actually creates value by making a resource whose utility is greater than the sum of its raw resources (e.g. a shoe factory). If we treat the raw materials (leathers, rubbers, dyes, etc) as being "usurped and kidnapped", the shoe factory definitely does more than just "hold them hostage" before release.
Also I think it just doesn't make sense to refer to storage/warehousing as "holding hostage". The entire point of holding X hostage (even something non-living) is that you threaten to kill/destroy X unless your demands are met, and when someone pays ransom to release a hostage, they generally do not own the hostage. When I buy something from Amazon, it is so that I can own and use it somehow, at no point does Amazon threaten to destroy the merchandise if I don't pay up (and if they did, they would be met with perplexed indifference)
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
I agree that the commenter should not have darkly hinted, but I feel like you're being deliberately obtuse here...
To make the point explicit - the name "Tatishe Nteta" strongly suggests that the author's race is sub-Saharan African (and we can look at his faculty page to clear up any doubt), so the fact that he carried out a poll that supposedly shows public support for DEI (i.e. state-backed anti-White discrimination) gives another example on a long list of non-White (but especially Black) intellectuals for whom almost all of their published works are attempts to critique and undermine White people/identity.
I'm guessing, beyond the poor forum ettiquette, you also take issue with what is actually being darkly hinted at here. Perhaps you just don't believe in HBD (in which case there isn't much to say, since I would agree with academics like Ntete under ~HBD) - but if you do believe in HBD, then what do you think is wrong with what Magus implied?
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
I am not claiming that this is the criteria libraries use in real life to decide what is allowed on their shelves (I will join you in not being a rube here), or even that it should be the criteria they use.
I'm arguing that this is the criteria for whether something is erotica or not, and that it's disingenuous to call Gender Queer "erotica" and deny the fact that it does indeed attempt to convey complex ideas and emotions (albeit ideas that offend some people's sensibilities, and whose spread may well be damaging to society)
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
What I have argued and will continue to argue is that there is a constant churn of Cthulhu swimming left, towards greater and greater degradation of the commons...
I agree with the pattern you observe (but I have mixed feelings over whether it is a bad thing), and I also find it very annoying that normie progressives simultaeneously show radical acceptance towards the thing of [current year] and hostile disgust towards the stuff that hasn't yet been normalised.
But I believe that: a) In the specific case of gender queer, it is not happening b) When it does happen (now or in the future), it's not that bad.
... it’ll be someone defending librarians pushing kids towards cutesy drawings of some author’s autobiographical exploration of the first time they let their dog fuck them.
And if that does happen in the future, that would also not necessarily be erotica. It's not about whether you, personally, find the lifestyle choices being proselytised gross or icky - the question is "does this work attempt to convey complex ideas and emotions that provoke the reader to think?" (or in the other direction - "would anyone want to read this work with both hands outside of their pants?")
I can easily imagine a serious piece of literature being written on this topic, in the style of "Gender Queer":
- The author describes feelings of alienation around the time of puberty - the other children keep talking excitedly about having sex with boys, girls, they/thems, and some even express not being interested in sex at all.
- The author thinks they are asexual, until one day, when they petsit for their best friend, they have a "horrible" revelation that they do have a sexuality after all...
- Some occassional, short, tasteful scenes depicting their awkward teenage attempts at sex with animals ("Ugh! I didn't know dogs would have such bad breath...", "I guess female ducks really do have corkscrew vaginas!")
- The author's philisophical musings about the capacity of their partner to consent (how can animals, who cannot speak, convey consent?) and the need for them to consent (we are okay with killing them to eat their flesh - is it that bad to have sex of questionable consent with them...?)
- Anecdotes about an initially unaccepting friends and family, and teasing/bullying from classmates
- A saccharine last page showing the author and their non-human SO affectionately licking their face, with captions "I know I've struggled a lot with being your owner... but I love being your partner!"
And yes, we can play this game again for any other "degenerate" aspect of human sexuality that also currently lies to the left of the Overton window (pedophillia, necrophillia, vore, etc)
Or maybe you’ll find your grandkid reading it in the library’s booknook and you’ll be appalled. I don’t know. But your current arguments are toothless to me because my stance is that Gor in the school library was already too much.
Why is it so terribly awful for children to be exposed to actual erotica? (I am now moving onto point b - I maintain that Gender Queer is not erotica) My school library did not stock "Gor", but it did stock an adult fantasy novel, whose last half was a thinly-veiled femdom porn fantasy:
Soon after, Richard is captured by a beautiful young Mord-Sith named Denna, who tortures him for a month. Mord-Sith wear skin-tight red leather catsuit, blood-red, to hide the blood of their captives during the training sessions. They live to torture and condition men into obedient pets, who live and breathe to please them, and Mistress Denna is the best of all Mord-Sith at this task. After only half an hour at her mercy, he is left groveling on the dungeon floor, begging to please his mistress to avoid pain. She chains him up by his wrists from the ceiling, in order to being his 'training'. She then trains and break him into her obedient slave by the use of several instruments, including a painful small red leather rod by the name of the Agiel. Once Richard is broken, she takes him for her sexual mate
The actual book is even more sexualised than even this account would suggest (his "training" spans many pages) - I recall the "Mord-Sith" telling the protagonist to focus on her latex-clad breasts to avoid the pain of the Agiel (it can read the submissive's victim's thoughts, and hurts them when they think bad things about the domme Mord-Sith), another Mord-Sith who is implied to castrate her "pets", and another still who actually makes them communicate in barks and go on "walks" with her through the town naked, collared and on all-fours.
As a pre-teen, I did indeed find this "confusing" (I was not aware that it was supposed to be erotic, so I wondered if there was something seriously wrong with me for finding graphic descriptions of "torture" arousing), and I remember feeling deeply ashamed about my enjoyment of the book and all the fantasies I had that were inspired by the book. And now... I'm an adult - and nothing bad happened. I don't have some kind of PTSD, I understand that was just a fantasy written by a horny guy (and Denna is not an accurate representation of female sexuality), I didn't develop an irrational fear/hatred towards women because I associate them with Denna, etc. Reading this synopsis of the book now, I can only laugh at how silly and over-the-top the whole thing was in retrospect.
This was not a good thing (as in, I'm not going to encourage any future children I have to read TWFR so they can experience what I experienced) - but in retrospect, this seems to be on a similar level of badness to the long list of other minor things that made my teenage years less than storybook.
But going back to point (a) - I think it's borderline even whether something like TWFR counts as "erotica" (the first half was just a normal fantasy novel, with mature themes, and the book did seriously explore the idea of being tortured - the Mord-Siths were not dominatrices, the torture depicted was very real and non-consensual, with blood and genuine agony)
Gender Queer is nowhere close to this border. Having skimmed the book, it totals 240 pages, of which there are exactly 2 short scenes that are of a sexual nature (the strap-on blowjob mentioned by the media, and also a medical exam showing the author naked without any scenery censor) - all of the remaining pages are just ordinary comic book drawings with pro-LGBT storylines and perspectives.
It is a reasonable position to be against titles like Gender Queer on the basis that you are against their underlying message, and do not want to normalise pursuing sexually deviant lifestyles (especially not to impressionable young children) - as I said at the start of the comment, I also have mixed feelings over the LGBTQ+ movement. But I think it is completely unreasonable to object on the grounds that works like these are pornographic (because they aren't)
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
My results:
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Full scale: 136
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Memory: 132 (VM 76/85, EM 15/26)
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Verbal: 137 (V 25/34, A 22/27)
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Spatial: 136 (MR 16/17, CP 13/18)
It is almost midnight for me, so I was fairly tired, but judging from other comments this is standard (in practice - who's actually going to block out some prime focus time in the midday to do an unmoderated online IQ test?)
My thoughts on the test sections:
Visual memory
I think this was a pretty good test in being robust to gaming - the only issue I can think of is the question of whether you can move your mouse into a convenient position whilst the image plays (I decided the fair thing to do is to not touch your mouse at all until the animation finishes)
Exposure memory
This felt like the most "IQ"ish test for me, in that there was no conscious thinking at all. I initially planned to just rapidly repeat the sequence to myself as it played, then I realised I can't articulate an image like this in words in a fraction of second. (Was there anyone who could actually generate short verbal encodings for the icons on the fly?)
My strategy was to just passively consume it and then just click whatever icons "spoke" to me without thinking (and then adding in any others I remembered properly with a few seconds conscious recall)
Vocab
I had heard before that Vocab is extremely g-loaded, and this EOK article gives r=0.8 (I haven't read the article though, I just skipped to the table)
I always found this really weird. When I first started believing in IQ (as a measure of something beyond "how well you do IQ tests") I had always assumed that any word stuff would be less g-loaded than "maths" stuff like shape rotation (because STEM people are smarter than humanities people) - I suppose since we hear/read so many words, even really weird ones like "diaphanous" come up at least once, and if you're more intelligent, you process your stimuli more efficiently, so fewer strange words and concepts fly over your head.
Anagram
I think this is the worst subtest. Some other tests are gameable in this specific interface, as there is no time limit, and they could just be fixed by adding a timer.
But I know from personal experience that anagram solving are extremely trainable - I have a friend (of similar intelligence to me, based on exam results and working together) who can unscramble 9 letter anagrams in seconds (even using bizarre words), as he enjoys playing "word games" like this, and knows various patterns, heuristics, etc. I believe he would easily max out this test.
Mental Rotations
As @Pigeon pointed out, the shape rotation was too easy (I got 16/17, and I believe it would have been 17/17 if I had used my \infty time correctly and checked my work properly), especially without a timer. I just did a "mental rotation" without much effort or strain (I suppose if you didn't partition the shape into "plane" + "protrusion" it might have been hard, but I suppose you need good spatial intelligence to notice something like this)
Center Points
After the test, I looked it up - it turns out this is a "thing" - it's called the Geometric Median, and there does not appear to be a simple "trick" that allows you to estimate it in your head.
I'm not sure to what extent they wanted us to just go on vibes for this one (The most advanced maths I used here was to count the number of squares in each group when they were clearly clustered) - I remember around Q10-ish I realised there were 24 questions and got impatient and started almost instant-answering a lot of questions.
Also - I realise the vague "mental picture" I had for this problem was completely off - I did not clock that the optimising set has to be convex (since the objective is convex), and had mental images of things like arcs or isolated points (and I think I even hallucinated correct answers of this form in my memory as I progressed through the rounds - maybe because the first question, of a 2x2 square doesn't look convex since the guide answer doesn't include the 2x2 itself)
This doesn't massively effect the actual problem, but curious if anyone else also had the same wrong picture in their minds? I don't know why, but it still feels sort of wrong to me that the objective is convex (even with really weird point placements, you can't get any local optima?) - but on the other hand... it's literally a sum of convex functions! This feels like quite a big oversight on my part, hopefully I was just tired...?
Amongst my close friends in undergrad, there used to be a guy who had a ~150 IQ (he was the only member of the group who had it measured "properly" by a professional - he had a psychologist friend and he agreed to be one of the test subjects for something), and he was noticeably duller than the rest of us in [hard STEM subject we all studied] - this was evidenced objectively in exam results (and he worked to try get good results) I'm not sure if he is just one of those unfortunate people on the vertex of the functionality/IQ ellipse, or if it really was just a "culture" issue (maybe he was just overloaded with extra-curriculars, he had test-anxiety, etc - normally I'd discount those explanations as cope - but then... 150 IQ!)
Anyways, I always secretly hoped/fantasised that maybe the 150IQ really did correspond to the expected level of functionality, and that I was actually more functional - so maybe I was actually some kind of genius with a +4 sigma IQ (and I've never done genius things like getting an IMO gold medal because something something environment something something Newton was an unremarkable undergraduate something something) - so it was a little disheartening to have my unlikely fantasy extinguished completely.
And I think this is part of why I've never actually taken the effort to find an online IQ test (despite thinking about IQ and intelligence, and even talking about it with friends, a lot) - but obviously that was bad and irrational. More information can only ever add utility, because you can always do whatever you want anyways. I can already face the reality of having a 136IQ because I've been living it for my whole life, that which can be killed by the truth should perish, the cat was already dead before I opened the box, etc
FlyOnTheWall
1mo ago
I think the squeamishness is less about Black people in general and more about the physical danger posed by exposure to a demographic that, on the group level, is ~10x more likely to commit a violent crime than Whites. The current state of civil rights is that it's basically on the say so of the Black - if a Black is in a White space, they are allowed to be there until they actually commit a crime. They would actually have to punch, stab or try to rape someone to be removed. But until then, all they have to do is claim to be a law-abiding citizen - no additional qualifications, White friends to vouch, etc - and no one can do anything about it. In fact, it's much more likely that a White person who objects to sharing spaces with Black people will get in trouble for being "racist" than the Black will.
But in all seriousness - as far as I can tell, the usual arguments for sex-segregated spaces (and anti-trans policies in general) apply pretty much verbatim to race-segregated spaces. Specifically, the idea that if group X is much more likely to do [bad thing] than group Y, society should segregate the 2 groups (and in practice, just prevent group X from interacting with group Y, and have "X spaces" just be for everyone) And even though such a policy hurts the majority of group X who are totally innocent, the physical safety of group Y outweight their wounded ego.
You can just yeschad.jpg and say you want Jim Crow again (and there are probably users on the forum who would), but this does not seem to be the position of the majority of those who oppose transgender ideology (even on this forum) - so I ask, how do you explain such radically different stances on these (seemingly similar to me) issues?
Why would it make you vaguely uncomfortable? ... Is it the deference for white people that makes you feel uncomfortable?
For a typical person, I think they'd be uncomfortable for broadly that reason (Well, I think a conservative wouldn't find it uncomfortable initially - but they absolutely would once you point out the dynamic)
As far as I'm concerned self_made_human's attitudes are perfectly valid, and should really be the norm for all immigrants
I agree - but obviously that can't happen in the current state. The official line is that all races are equal - and in this worldview self_made_human's attitude is deeply problematic, and a manifestation of trauma from the White supremacy enforced upon his ancestral homeland during colonization (if that were the case - I would also find it deeply uncomfortable)
I'm not sure how you'd envision this actually becoming a norm (maybe you're just idly wishing) - I don't have a serious proposal.
I wonder how far you'd get by "just" by making HBD common knowledge, and no further interference - how would a typical "brown" person (here I mean neither White nor Jewish nor East Asian) react to the knowledge that the ultimate cause of the dysfunctions in their old home is not White supremacy, the government, or even the culture - but the actual race who make up the country (which includes them!)
I mean this is already going to make them feel guilty - especially if they were progressive (these would be the main source of principled people who oppose SMH's sentiments): this whole time it wasn't White people causing the problems of the world - it was you! (The arguments about how White people are guilty of perpetrating White supremacy by being complicit, "silence is violence", etc - these are all still true on the meta level - except now you realise you're the one causing harm)
Also - in the case of a indidivual skilled immigrant, it is indeed a mutually beneficial arrangement. But obviously the benefit to the immigrant is massive compared to the country, to whom each specific person is just a rounding error - so already a kindness is being payed by actually affording them all the same legal privileges as the natives despite having all the leverage (in the non-HBD world - this is something the immigrant is morally entitled to since the country is only such a nice place to live because they stole resources from the 3rd World - how else could a tiny island of a few million people, of equal competence to all other humans, manage to have so many nice things?)
I agree, but doesn't this logic follow through to literally every "freedom"? When someone exercises free speech to advocate for X, they deprive those opposed to it from living in a ~X society, etc.
That is how I view the notion of "freedoms" (i.e. incoherent because you can just switch framings to switch what is/is not a freedom) - but it seems that some right-wingers like you and @AvocadoPanic think freedoms make sense in general (and sexual degeneracy in particular just doesn't count)
Could you give an example of an act of moral degeneracy that would still count as freedom? (Otherwise, I think we should just use the word degeneracy, since that is less ambiguous than "freedom")
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