Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
Hello back frens
User ID: 2022
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I think the shared core of the argument is: An account of whats good for an animal based on what that animal itself pursues, in terms that are causally relatively close to perception and behaviour, and independent of their actual environment, and a claim that we have a responsibility to individual animals to do whats good for them.
Its not important for my argument whether these actually are wrong.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
as she seems to treat things like poachers as a limitation on the capacity of humans, instead of a chosen activity of humans
In retrospect, I should have included that as one of the cathedralising signs.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I think it reflects a lack of familiarity with the world of academic philosophy.
I think your comment reflects a lack of familiarity with the Cthulhu discourse Im trying to address. Admittedly it doesnt have a canonical name or good reference link. But a good example here would be Benthams defense of homosexuality. When he wrote that, it wasnt a new culture war thing either. But eventually it was.
I don't think it's fair to call this a utilitarian piece.
And here too, we can return to the above example and see that many of those who would later advance the issue were not especially utilitarians, but still employed a broadly similar reasoning turning on similar facts, from deontological or humanistic backgrounds.
I also agree shes not making this argument because its gaining mainstream currency. My point it about what its intellectual history would look like, if it were to gain mainstream currency, and what this tells us about evaluating the relevance of things like the Bentham example to the intellectual history of our current politics.
Im sorry how contrived this looks if you dont know who Im trying to talk to.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
When was the vaccine mandate rational? I remember when the debate got big here in Austria, there were already multible countries with 90%+ vax rates that had new flareups.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I dont think regret particularly matters, because its a backwards-looking measure. Its possible that youll regret all or none of the possible decisions, after you actually make them.
Its more about the idea of the "real self", and how the social environment needs to "let it develop". This is common among liberals and especially in the trans discourse, so I was surprised by you position seeming to give it little weight.
Applying principal component analysis (PCA) to a dataset of four populations sampled evenly: the three primary colors (Red, Green, and Blue) and Black illustrate a near-ideal dimension reduction example.
Note: colours are represented as RGB, from 0 to 1 instead of 255.
Although PCA correctly positioned the primary colors at even distances from each other and Black, it distorted the distances between the primary colors and Black (from 1 in 3D space to 0.82 in 2D space).
No shit. What this means in terms of genetics is that if you have 3 source populations A B C, and A and B are relatively genetically similar, say only differ on 100 allels, and C is very different from them, differing on 1000 allels, and then you do PCA on various populations that are mixed out of those, the PCA plot wont tell you that A and B are similar. It will only tell you the relative admixtures of A B C in the sampled populations. Of course, this is often exactly what you want.
Its an especially bizzare complaint since the "allel distance" can already be calculated from the raw data, and represented easily, without doing PCA or anything of that sort.
Box 1: Studying the origin of Black using the primary colors
Same dataset as before, except they change the relative sampling frequency of the colours, and show that this can change which primary colour black is closest to.
The problem here is that the author seems to think that black "should" come out an even mixture, but it isnt. Genetic mixture is weighted averaging, and that even mixture would be (1/3, 1/3, 1/3), a darkish grey. Black cant be any kind of mixture of the others. In all these plots you see a pyramid rotated to various angles.This is not a "near-ideal dimension reduction", that would look flatter in 3D. In fact you could also make it so that black is outside the triangle of the other 3, dont know why he doesnt show that.
What this tells us genetically is that a plot of n PCs can only depict the relative admixture of n+1 source populations. If there are more, youll only see those n+1 most important to your sample (ideally, if the others dont matter very much), or rotations between that (less ideally). So you do often need to look at more than 2 PCs, but if the samples are actually admixed from a few sources, you wont need very many.
Also notice that the shift in relative sample size needed to create these changes in the example is multible orders of magnitude, and the more "reducible" the data is the more drastic they need to be.
Based on this we get:
Reich et al.44 presented further PCA-based “evidence” to the ‘out of Africa’ scenario. Applying PCA to Africans and non-Africans, they reported that non-Africans cluster together at the center of African populations when PC1 was plotted against PC4 and that this “rough cluster[ing]” of non-Africans is “about what would be expected if all non-African populations were founded by a single dispersal ‘out of Africa.’” However, observing PC1 and PC4 for Supplementary Fig. S3, we found no “rough cluster” of non-Africans at the center of Africans, contrary to Reich et al.’s44 claim... This is an example of how vital a priori knowledge is to PCA.
You could also tell a priori knowledge was used because youre shown PC1 and 4. Someone looked at more than that and chose to show you these. This is also why its dumb to show you PC1&4 from his replications with changed relative samplesizes: If you looked at more PCs (and probably not many more) youd find a combination that replicates Reichs plot or something similar, because again youre just rotating your perspective on the same shape. (Or not, see below.)
Also if you read the Reich cite (I recommend if you have access (arrr), its only 2 pages), youll see its primarily about integrating PCA with other sources of information, and that plot is an example. Also also he seems to have done the PCA on Africans only, and then plotted the others into those PCs, whereas the author is doing PC on all of them.
Box 2: Studying the origin of Black using the primary and one secondary (admixed) color populations
Following criticism on the sampling scheme used to study the origin of Black (Box 1), the redoubtable Black-is-Red group genotyped Cyan.
The RGB for Cyan is (0, 1, 1), which is again not a mixture of previous colours. Black, Blue, Green, and Cyan might be mixtures of 3 other colours that lie outside the RGB space, but thats still 4 source populations.
Pretty much the same goes as I said for Box 1.
This is where i stopped reading.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Huh. I do none of the things you listed, and cant really think of any replacements either. It doesnt feel difficult to me, and indeed not even like Im resisting the tentacled grasp of technology or anything. Its just... sort of how things play out. I dont think this has made my emotional states more different from those of normies. It feels weird to read this in the tone of "we as a society" rather than maybe "I might have a bit of a problem".
I can’t find the limiting principles.
Most people just dont actively seek out ways to adjust their emotion, they just drink their coffee in the morning and their beer on friday night and stuff like that because those are just kind of what you do, and leave it at that. Thats pretty effective at preventing you from becoming unrecognisable in your lifetime at least.
Part of me thinks that this is enhancing me, making me more human
And part of me wonders if I even know what real is any more.
This seems like youre just saying real because its kind of the most generic word and you dont know better how to say what you have a problem with. I think this is much less about particular tools being "over a line", and more of a worry that tinkering will turn into (or indeed, inescapably already is) true optimisation, and where that might lead you. That maybe, if you were given enough options, you would end up making yourself not so human. Not for any failure of will, but because there genuinely seems to be no argument against each step.
And then the problem of others...
I mean, that paragraph sounds a lot like stereotypical stoned thoughts, irrespective of the mood organ path that got you there.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
It depends. Presumably you can also regain the capacity by practicing it again, for example, and in that case the longer time-horizons wouldnt care it went away. And if you set it up in a way where it did matter, then probably your capacity to slavishly obey someone would matter in a similar way. The formalism youve found just isnt particularly related to your problem, and if you find a way to make it do what you want it will be mostly your additions that are doing that work.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
You make two claims here, first that it doesnt need to be true, and second that you dont need to believe it. Youve only given an argument for the first.
To give maybe a bit of a different perspective: I think you come to your conclusions in part because you evaluate the benefit of religion in a way thats already independent of the content of the beliefs. That way, the benefit can only be to make something happen that already ought to have happened - the typical "solving coordination problems" line of rat-adjacent cultural evolutionism.
As an analogy: Imagine there are two people on an island. In world A their goals are convex, so that both of them are better off controlling half the island than with a 50% chance of controlling it all. In world B, their goals are concave and they would rather go for the coinfilp. People in A will live together relatively peacefully, and people in B will immediately fight to the death. But it would be wrong to conclude that "Peace is a benefit of believing you live in an A world" (as statistics might lead you to). Peace is in fact bad in the B world, for both of them, irrespective of what they believe.
Basically, it seems to me that a lot of the "benefits" of religion are just things people would want to do, if the world were a more fortunate one.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
I guess you can just make a spectrum argument where the further away from our thought and society the harder it is to evaluate.
I think this is clearer than it may seem. The field itself tells you what is an improvement, and an improvement is within the field. It may look very different afterwards, much like the output of a programm may look very different after youve corrected an off-by-one error. This can be difficult to judge, in that it requires deep understanding of the field, but its not unclear. Of course, minor drifts which are not improvements happen all the time, but while a tradition is alive and well, they are eventually corrected and do not accumulate into larger drifts the way a random walk would. When it no longer does this there is simply no capital-H Historical period for a while. They dont need to be everywhere, just like not all of nature is alive.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1yr ago
Reading the head paragraph, I hoped for something more ambitious than le hypocrisy line. I think that really only effects a small fraction of our beliefs, most of them are stuff like "the store closes at 8". There might be a case against even those sorts of beliefs, where the replacement concept issome derivative of affordances rather than S-dispositions. For example, someone "believing" that "the store closes at 8" might not thereby have any expectations about when an aquaintance working at the store is free for the evening - the "belief" only tells them when the "go shopping" option is available.
Instead, I think a lot of what we standardly call beliefs might be better characterised as "context-sensitive dispositions to agree or disagree with assertions". Call these S-dispositions.
What makes you think those are a "natural kind", other than that it fits with the point you want to make here? This idea is defined in terms of results, and sticks fairly close to them, it seems unlikely to be mechanistically important to psychology. What cases can you think of where an S-disposition causes other important psychological states, especially ones which stick around beyond the immediate situation?
Potentially nitpicking, but about a third of your examples fall under this:
Is there something epistemically or morally problematic about someone who casually says things like "Americans are idiots" in specific social contexts yet in practice holds many Americans in high esteem?
Theres a sematic question if this is even inconsistent. I think the topic was called "general generalisations" or something like that.
I have the impressions sometimes that people who rediscover non-individualistic ideology end up looking even less individualistic than those that are already there. Their conclusions from it tend to be very ant-colony-maintainance and top-down-rule, because theyre applying the same egoist materialism as before, but now from the perspective of the community instead of an individual.
This is how many people see things even after doing the first step away from individualism, and most definitely before that. So when you talk about Great Men in any context other than them already being leaders who are followed, it will sound relatively more individualistic to them.
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