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Lykurg

We're all living in Amerika

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joined 2022 December 29 10:51:01 UTC

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User ID: 2022

Lykurg

We're all living in Amerika

1 follower   follows 0 users   joined 2022 December 29 10:51:01 UTC

					

Hello back frens


					

User ID: 2022

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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.

Thank you, this looks very interesting.

Ive always thought that historical incomparability cant apply to civilised peoples, precisely because they think about history. That enables them to disagree with you and your theory of history that you put them into. You cant "input sanitise" them when you put them in there, without denying that they were talking about the history that they themselves are in. And yet, here is someone who wrote a whole book about what people thought of history, asserting that incomparability. I wonder how he tries to square that.

I agree with your application of this version of progress to the Cthulhu swim, if "problem" is understood correctly: In the version I believe, what counts as a "problem" for the sake of progress in a field is determined by the field itself. Not us, or an "objective observer", looking at the state if the field and thinking something is bad, but the internal criteria that are already present in the field. I would guess that is what Collingwood means as well, but your comment doesnt make it clear to an unfamiliar reader, and it could lead to very different takeaways.

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.

My idea of life and freedom, were I to succeed in rigorously defining it, would probably be similar to «empowerment gain» in this theoretical ML paper

This doesnt do what you want it to do.

First, its defined in terms of what the agent could do in the future, not what it will actually do. So if the pothead could do something productive but had his values shifted to where he doesnt want to any more, that wouldnt limit his empowerment in the sense defined there.

Also its defined for discrete finite outcome states, and adapting it to the continuous case requires an additional parameter, most simply a measure on the outcome space which tells you how valuable granularity of control is in different parts of that space relative to each other.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm socially liberal enough that no matter what the actual underlying case may be, I can justify pronoun hospitality, nickname hospitality, and access to hormone treatments and cosmetic surgeries. But I'm not sure if something like Blanchard's typology, or social contagion theory, or something-something autism turned out to be the underlying cause of transgenderism that the general public would agree.

So you would support hormones and surgeries for transgenderism caused by social contagion? That sounds interesting, could you flesh that out?

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.

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.

Martha Nussbaum writes about wild animal suffering in the New York Review of Books.

Sort of. That exact wording is not used, and the utilitarian discourse on the subject not referenced, but it clearly is the same general thought. And it is very cathedralised. We have:

The "everything is political":

In the US, “wild horses” and other “wild” creatures live under the jurisdiction of our nation and its states. To the extent that they have limited rights of nonintervention, free movement, and even a type of property rights, that is because human law has seen fit to give them these rights. Humans are in control everywhere. Humans decide what habitats to protect for animals, and leave the animals only what they decide not to use.

One might grant that the current status quo is that humans dominate everywhere, while still recommending that humans simply back off and leave all the “wild” animals in all of these spaces to do the best they can for themselves. Even that proposal would require active human intervention to stop human practices that interfere with animal lives: poaching, hunting, whaling. And it would be, it seems, a gross abnegation of responsibility: we have caused all these problems, and we turn our backs on them, saying, “Well, you are wild animals, so live with it as best you can.” It is not clear what would be accomplished by this pretense of a hands-off policy.

The critical theorising:

There are also some very bad reasons for not moving against predation. Part of the Romantic idea of “the wild” is a yearning for violence. Blake’s Tyger and Shelley’s West Wind are emblems of what some humans feel they have lost by becoming hypercivilized. A longing for (putatively) lost aggression lies behind a lot of people’s fascination with large predatory animals and indeed with the spectacle of predation itself.

(And much more in this direction. That is most of the article.)

And just enough mention of the exterminationist angle to stay deniable:

Moreover, the animal reservation is geared as a whole to this exercise: the wild dogs are highly endangered, and much effort is made to preserve them. I am agnostic about the desirability of preserving that species, but I think here the central concern prompting preservation is a bad one: money from sado-tourism.

I find this interesting in light of an ongoing debate about cthulhu theory: Whether new leftist causes are relatively obvious consequences of general principles that have already been driving the movement for a long time, or have more short-term cynical explanations. I lean towards the former and think this example supports that:

I think that today, its easy to see the Singer&Co rationale in an article like this. But if the Motte-equivalent of 2100 is arguing about that, and everyone has heard stuff like the link in public school, and then someone tries explain how this was anticipated by the obscure philosoper Singer, I can imagine that going quite a lot worse.

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.

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.

Not necessarily from the same premises. Its a more general sense that, if the Singerian argument werent valid, hers would not be either. That can be because ethical theories share machinery, because they hinge on similar questions of fact, because they draw on the same intuitions, or some other reason.

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.

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.

Of course it's not exactly hard to figure out why that might be

And if there were a lot of overlap, it would not be hard to figure out its because the revisionists are far-rightists and so obviously carry water for Putin.

Similarly, the number of people moving into a city will be upper bounded by some multiple of the number of salaried jobs that the city can support.

And it historically kept being met. In the 1980s people randomly decided that cities around the world were 'full'. By what mechanism did the degree of fullness get determined and why stop at this arbitrary time in the late 20th century ?

The 80s were the inflection point of an economic change, where now the number of salaried jobs increases as the people in the city increase. In the old days, a city would be built around a resource, often a trade route, that had some absolute size of economic surpluss to be extracted. There were jobs for the people extracting it, those brought people in, then there were jobs for services for those people, which brought more people in, etc, but this would taper off quickly and the population stayed limited. Then with industrialisation, you could create surplus anywhere. But you still need food as an input for the workers, and initially that still limited the growth of the cities by how far it could (afford to) be transported. But eventually, technology became so good that its now basically irrelevant where a city is. Really only container ship access matters, and thats a matter of if. ~Noone who has it is physically blocked from expanding it. Now, the best place to run your generic company is in the biggest city, and so it the best place to look for a job, and the only price that can go against it is that of the space.

If you solve this by just building ever more, the result is maybe ten gigantic cities in the whole world (plus small mining towns scattered far apart). And that might be the most efficient thing to do in some sense, but housing still wont be as cheap as it used to. Things just want to clump together now, and they will always want a bit more.

But is the broadening of the accepted reasons really a problem? Assume for a moment that puberty blockers worked as advertised (no interference with normal desistance processes). Is there something inherently wrong with offering kids who are experiencing discomfort with their gender puberty blockers? One might argue that categories like non-binary or genderqueer don’t exist and are artificially created for ideological reasons, but if they do, I’m not sure what the issue is.

Whats the scenario here? So you have kids who have some sort of gender problem but dont want to transition, and you give them puberty blockers. If nothing changes about their gender situation, what then? Do they just keep taking blockers permanently? I mean, progressivism making people literally not grow up is funny as an idea, but probably not so funny if it actually happens.

And if you dont start out with the idea that normal development is the "good outcome", why would it be a problem if they interfere with desistance? At most you can say that trans people end up less happy. But hypothetically that could change, and the interference remain the same.

The simpler explanation would be that trans women attracted more scrutiny, so of course people who declared themselves to be pro-trans focused on touching women and female-related terms. Trans men don’t seriously threaten men in the same way, and good luck trying to start a mens-rights movement which might be threatened by them.

There are more arguments Joyce makes for the preservation of single-sex (basically only women’s) and the dangers of allowing trans women to enter those spaces, but they’re not very interesting or worth expounding on. If you understand the argument that males tend to be more violent, especially sexually, towards females, you’ve read about a dozen or so pages in this book already.

The feminism is getting in the way of the analysis here: Men dont worry about transmen because whatever they could do was already done by normal women. They demanded to be included in previously male-only spaces, and that those change to accomodate them. But this goes back to "The only allowed reason to not like someone is that hes evil", and so she has to claim this is about violence.

Why there wasn't really a fight over trans men joining isn't really the point, I think. I'm arguing that trans men don't get any privileges by acting like cis men.

Those are the same point. They dont get any privileges that way because they already had them as women. If theres any advantages to being a man, weve gotten outraged about and tried to eliminate them a while ago.

You ask «Why would one choose to identify as a powerless victim», but the crux is that if you don't have systemic power, you don't get to choose your identity

or fight for the slice of the pie the collective identity you have been defined into gets.

Do you think blacks got their current status in western society by "winning" it from whites?

Yes, but that doesnt mean its true. Black activism has always mostly looked how progressivism at the time thought it was supposed to look, and its successes were mostly given to them by white people either directly or by giving them things that materially imply them.

I mean, if our elites decided that riots will no longer be tolerated, what do you think happens? You of all people should know better than to think a reverse of the old race relations could really happen.

Interesting topic in a thread below

Consider: a society of just downies and Henrys* wouldn't even be a society, while a society of Enron, Google, and AXA is just ... our society.

A society of my aunt and Henrys would necessarily devolve into hunter gatherers who would be in a precarious position.

A rival hunter gatherer society of entirely Enron, Google and AXA professionals would be a tribe that my retarded aunt and Henry with comparable numbers of similar nature would probably subjugate easily, eventually integrating violent strong men or wise old women, humiliating the rest in servitude.

I think this is probably a point of disagreement for many here and so worth discussing on its own. I see two larger topics that this could become a test for: One is the model of "general competence"/IQ maximalism, expecting successful people to be successful at ~everything, vs a tradeoff between abstract thinking and practical or social skills. Second, whether our current elites are in some sense a paper tiger - bullshit jobs, Overcredentialism, etc.

*"I had a patient, let’s call him ‘Henry’ for reasons that are to become clear, who came to hospital after being picked up for police for beating up his fifth wife."

Seems like Im a bit rusty. Better now?