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MaiqTheTrue

Zensunni Wanderer

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joined 2022 November 02 23:32:06 UTC

				

User ID: 1783

MaiqTheTrue

Zensunni Wanderer

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 November 02 23:32:06 UTC

					

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User ID: 1783

I think that I’d add the various types of enlightenment beliefs

Dark Enlightenment: the idea that the Enlightenment was a bad idea and that pre-enlightenment society was better.

Grey Enlightenment: the Enlightenment was fine.

White Enlightenment: the enlightenment was a good idea.

I’ve always seen the “I used to be a reader” thing as largely LARP. People want to seem like they’re better than they are so they claim that they “used to read so much,” when I can remember from my (pre-iPhone) days in high school, and people were not sitting around the hallways reading books and magazines and so on. They were socializing, talking about the opposite sex cuties, talking about sports and fashion. At home, I mean sure I occasionally read a book, but I think I and most of my peers were watching TV, playing sports or making art or something else. Books haven’t been a mainstay of leisure activities since the advent of television.

I think there might well be benefits to disconnecting from the hyper online culture we’ve created. And to me the main benefit is in hearing your own inner voice telling you what you’re actually like, the kinds of things you actually want to do, the things you really believe in and think about the world. The problem for me isn’t that “I suddenly can’t read a book”, it’s that the firehouse of information and entertainment that we are pushed to keep track of all the time tends to crowd out the individual you actually are.

I don’t think people are suddenly aware of more subtle nuances of art either. The difference is in the fact that you aren’t viewing it with thoughts about how other people react and without the pressure of trying to fit in with whatever tribe you’re a part of.

I mean yes. It’s not like double cheeseburgers are magically fattening or something. And I understand that for some people it’s harder than others. But at the same time, unless you have no self control at all, some level of self denial is necessary and probably helpful. I think part of the issue is a cultural change that encourages snacking and never let someone feel hungry. In the 1970s and 1980s it was considered fairly normal to eat three meals and a small snack all day. Yes, people probably got hungry in between times, but I think that’s a normal thing. People get hungry or tired and so on and keep going.

Maybe this is just me personally but I find it empowering to some degree to challenge my limits and find out that I’m not a slave to my body. Just because I am tired, that doesn’t mean I can’t go lift weights or run a mile or whatever I need to get done to be healthy. Nor do I have to eat just because food is available or I feel slightly hungry. I can decide to give in or not.

It doesn’t surprise me. Most TMAs are basically LARP at this point, and they definitely feel the cognitive dissonance of watching MMA/BJJ fighters learn how to fight properly while they are awarded multiple belts and even half-belts for learning to play fight. You can get pretty high in the ranks of most TMAs without actually needing to demonstrate that you are a good fighter, where in MMA and BJJ rank comes directly from winning matches.

Most of these problems have an environmental component to them. Highly processed super-palatable food available for consumption almost everywhere you care to look at very cheap prices does create an environmental that favors obesity. But that’s not the whole thing. You still have at least some choice in the matter. The food doesn’t leap into your mouth and down your throat. And therefore you do have choices. You can remove such food from your environment— you can’t overeat on the cookies that you never bought in the first place. You can choose to not buy or use processed foods, which people doing various specialty diets tend to do, whether it’s keto, paleo, vegan, or carnivore. You can control the portion sizes as well. If you don’t eat double cheeseburgers you eat fewer calories.

I tend to be skeptical of drug induced weight loss simply because we haven’t been doing these trials long term. Nobody knows what these Ozempic and generic brands of ozempic will do long term. FenFen was a popular weight loss drug in the 1990s and 2000s. It turned out to damage the heart. Maybe the new class of drugs is better, but we don’t really have 10-20 years of use.

I think there’s a bit of bias toward “everyone is just like me” belief as well. If you and everyone you know are high achieving type A personalities who make time to work out, it’s not that hard to reason yourself to the conclusion that everyone is like that and simply lacks some sort of environmental helps that would make them successful. If I made it because of hard work, and everyone works hard, you must have some extra problems that I don’t have or you’d make it too.

Personally I think both can be true and in fact are true. There can be things like lack of money, exposure to ideas that you could use to build a great future, IQ, supportive familles, race , or even geographical proximity that can radically change your life prospects. But I don’t think that negates work. It’s not either or, it’s both and all of the above. What I see the left making the mistake on is that they think the existence of environmental or biological factors somehow means not having to work hard as well. I see systemic racism narratives as something poisonous to black people in so far as it convinced them to not bother to try.

I think you’d have to consider the environment as well. Are billions of krill destructive to the oceans? I know cattle farming produces tones of animal waste which can end up in streams and rivers. There’s also Methane cow farts for global warming. Land used to grow feed and to house the animals would be important factors. In short I think the most ethical way to think about eating animals is the environmental impact of those animals, because that impacts entire ecosystems.

The problem isn’t preventing them. As you say it’s impossible more or less. My concern with the over-emphasis on creating safety rules is that it almost guarantees that the AGI will be built in secret by people unconcerned with safety or worse wanting to use it for military or other aggressive purposes. This is the part I don’t see talked about much— whoever creates the first AGI will shape it to a large degree. And if that person is not “aligned” himself, then the ease of solving the alignment problem doesn’t actually matter.

I came to much the same conclusions a long time ago when I noticed that wealth, connections, and even geographical proximity to seats of power were never actually a part of any meaningful conversation on privilege. Which ultimately is nonsense — not because there’s no such things as racism and sexism, but that the oppression created by those things pales in comparison to wealth. And I think it can be pointed out quite simply by pointing to the minority or female children of rich adults. I think it’s actually easier to find success as the son of a black rich and famous person than it would be to find success as a working class white guy from Georgia.

And it really shows up in all sorts of ways. The “right” schools on your resume. The “right” sorts of clubs and experiences and volunteer opportunities. The right sorts of unpaid internships. And access to those things are almost always behind steep paywalls. Volunteering especially the kind that high end colleges seem to like (starting a charity yourself or going abroad) tend to be both time and money intensive. If you have to work as a teen for any reason, your application is not the right kind for elite schools. Likewise sports. The number of children in the pay for play college scandal who were given scholarships for obscure sports that really only the rich actually play was ridiculous. The median student has never been on a rowing team. Even after getting into school, having a good resume means study abroad programs and unpaid internships. Except those can be hard for students who cannot afford to not work while at school. So it’s like the joke about underpasses — yes it’s equally illegal for Elon Musk and a homeless guy to sleep under a bridge. But Elon musk doesn’t sleep under bridges. It’s equally important for both of us to getting into high paying jobs that we spend our time building a resume and reputation and network, but I need to work my way through school and you don’t. Well, who’s going to have an easier time making it?

Everything in America from health, to opportunities, to education and a million other things are dependent on having money. And it’s the one privilege that’s carefully rendered invisible under a deluge of talk about race, gender, and sexuality.

It looks like a random text. Or something. I don’t get it.

I don’t think that’s it. Most of these movements are punching down in a way that looks like punching up. The out groups tend to look like the powerful, but without any actual power of their own. DEI ostensibly hurts white men. But it doesn’t really affect powerful white men. The guys graduating from elite colleges, the ones whose parents run a business and can shuffle their son into the C suites aren’t harmed by DEI. Unconnected white men, men who lack the connections, generational wealth or parents business to bypass the cattle call of the job market, they are the ones losing out. So it has two groups who benefit and only one relatively unpopular group that doesn’t. The elites love DEI as a way to kneecap their competitors. Make it difficult for a white male computer programmer to move up and you don’t have to worry about him founding the next big company. Women and minorities love DEI because they get cherry positions in big companies and get their names and faces out there.

Even Israel Palestine tends to run along these lines. Jews look white enough that they can be white when the narrative calls for it. Then you can oppose the white colonialism without having to oppose the elites doing so. America has been pretty active in imposing its will on the world. We overthrow governments all the time, and have absolutely no problem with bombing the shiitake out of anyone we consider our enemies. We have absolutely no problem with imposing draconian sanctions on countries we don’t like. Israel was at least attacked by the country it’s at war with, Iraq never attacked us and got shock and awed and then occupied.

I think that dynamic— look like the powerful but be much weaker makes any group a good target for those involved in the oppression matrix line of thinking. Attacking someone obviously not like the elites invokes racism-sneers. It’s too obviously punching down to be effective. But if you punch down on someone who looks like you not only will that not look racist, but the victim cannot really defend himself. After all, to outsiders he looks like the people punching him. And so defending himself looks like privilege. How dare this guy object to black people getting the job over him? Doesn’t he know about oppression?

But given the near monopoly on cellular phones (only 3-4 major players) it’s not hard to create a situation in which unless you’re willing to void the warranty and risk an update bricking your jailbreak phone, you have no effective choice in whether you end up in a walled garden. The only question if all player in the game build a walled garden is “whose walled garden do I like the best. I suppose you technically have the choice to forgo cellphones entirely, though it would make communication difficult as land lines are down to about 30% of all homes.

If it’s substantially the same, yes. I think if the person can show by the similarity to the crime they committed that the story is clearly about them specifically, and that defaming details were added to the story, yes. If you combine six stories to create an original story that doesn’t match a real person’s crime specifically, no. The point here is that they specifically told the story of one guy, and it was obviously meant to be seen as his story, everyone who saw the show knew that it was about Daniel Perry. The only place the story deviated from the facts is that they made Daniel Perry basically a Nazi.

I think we’ve lost the ability to self organize to a large degree. There’s a sort of (https://www.adbusters.org/articles-coded/what-is-hypernormalization) hyper normalization that I’m observing in almost every aspect of modern life. It’s like everyone knows that the system doesn’t work anymore that our leaders don’t have any desire to fix things, most of the pre-centralized system institutions are largely withered away, and no one has any inkling of a way to get back to functioning society. We know, they know, they know we know, and none of it gets better because nobody has a vision of the future that doesn’t seem hopelessly naive.

I watch old shows from the past and what strikes me most is the lack of modern nihilism. People seemed to put up leaders who legitimately wanted to solve whatever the problem was, and the writers tended to play that straight up. The person not only wanted to do good, but he was allowed to defeat evil and fix the problems and we actually had a happy ending. Jedi were not opportunistic nihilists in it for themselves. The rebellion wanted a democracy for everyone. There was the sense that people in charge of things were altruistic and not self serving and that problems were fixable. It’s mostly gone. People just sort of default to a grim dark idea of the world in which nothing works, nothing gets fixed, and everyone has an angle.

And I think the nihilist mindset is part of why we no longer make those communities. If everything is unfixable and everyone is on the take, there’s no point in trying. Just get yous,protect yourself and your family, and try to not rely on other people and systems any more than you actually need to.

I think if I were making the law, I’d have it written such that if the average viewer could tell what the “ripped from the headlines” event was and it were substantially the same story, that they shouldn’t just be able to slap a “this is a fictional story” disclaimer in the beginning of the show and then be able to take these obviously real events and use them to drag the original person through the mud. It’s kind of the same as accusations of plagiarism— if I can show that your story is beat for beat similar to mine, then you might well be found guilty of plagiarism and thus you’d have to make restitution.

Especially in the current age where false accusations of certain beliefs or actions can make you unemployed very quickly (if his boss sees the episode and thinks the guy is a Nazi, he will likely fire the employee and others will be reluctant to hire him) which is a pretty serious harm to that person. At some point, you should be forced to correct the record and pay the loses because defamation isn’t a victimless crime anymore (if it ever was).

Morally speaking, yes it is defamatory. It’s obvious to anyone familiar with the subway incident that the story is in fact a direct reference to that event and that the audience is meant to assume that the background is at least somewhat accurate as well. And as to other stories, I think the same holds true. If I’m very obviously writing a story about George Floyd and then veer off into making my fictional Floyd into a drug dealing, gang-banging pimp, it’s very clear that I intended those accusations to filter down into the real person that my fictional character is a representation of.

And again just from a moral perspective, I think if you’re going to use a “ripped from the headlines” story, you need to change the story and the character enough that it’s not intuitively obvious that I’m talking about this specific person who did this specific thing. A fictional version of the story where the event happened somewhere other than a subway, and perhaps the guy getting choked had a weapon or whatever is probably a big enough change that the average viewer isn’t pointing to the screen with Daniel Perrry’s name on their lips. Then you have a fictional character that you can do whatever you want to do especially in making them hated in some way.

Or son Scott Card had advice about world building that amounted to “don’t use warp drive, everybody knows it’s Star Trek.” And I think in any fictional story, the general advice is good. If I’m creating my own fictional story, it’s bad practice to make it obvious where I’m getting my world building, characters, and events from simply because it tends to pull people out of the experience and in the case of using real events, transfer the fiction onto the real world.

It’s a back door ban though. If I can get companies to create a government friendly environment that doesn’t allow unapproved programs, it is a ban because very few people have the technical skills to get around the blockages.

I mean the trouble with walled gardens is similar to the problem of moderation. In both cases, my right to decide is outsourced to a keeper. There are sometimes good reasons to do this — letting just anyone mess with critical software in the OS is a very bad idea. Other times, it’s less about protecting the end user than enforcing ideas about what is good for that user, as when a mod to remove gay pride flags was banned. A policy that won’t let me or any program I use do things to my OS or access things like contact lists, social media accounts, or other critical data without at least making sure that I intend to do that is generally good. Likewise I think a moderation policy of keep on topic and be respectful is perfectly fine where a policy dictating the topics and allowed opinions isn’t.

I feel the same way. Like somehow all of American culture is stuck in some sort of eternal Peter Pan loop. Still into things made for and aimed at teens, still playing, incapable of taking anything seriously or having a serious conversation about topics that deserve to be taken seriously and need deep thought to understand and fix. I agree with the Chinese critique of us in the West — we are no longer a serious people who fix problems and build for the future. And we aren’t because we are mentally children.

I think it’s a culture change. And it’s not just sex. It’s a weird thing where people no longer simply do things for fun. They have to have a purpose to do them. You don’t read because you like it, you read because it’s good for you and keep track of all the books you read because you have to hit your reading goal of X books a year. You grind all the time to make money, but it doesn’t seem that most people are doing so because they intend to actually spend it, god forbid. Instead, it’s for show. They live minimalist spartan lifestyles to not spend money. It’s a bank number, nothing real. Even vacations are supposed to be learning experiences and get you to experience a new culture. Partying, relaxing on the beach, sitting around and reading a book, these things aren’t what people think a vacation should be. I’m kinda a duffer of a writer, it’s a hobby, and it seems like the entire culture around this hobby and art in general is about selling your work. I have no objection whatsoever to selling, but it’s a monofocus on publishing, on getting sales, and working on what will actually sell rather than on having fun. Even though getting your stuff out there can be literally free (a pdf and a webpage is good enough) nope, publishing is it, sell it.

To me, the entire experience of life in 2024 is an exercise in optimization. It’s not about enjoyment, fun, or doing things you enjoy doing for the sake of doing them. It’s about trying to optimize the time used to become a better person in whatever sense it is. Almost as if somehow we’ve lost the sense of doing things just because we want to do them, to have a good time doing them. And I think there are several reasons for this.

One is work culture. Everything has metrics and you’ve been judged by metrics since you were a child. Your parents sweat whether or not you’re keeping up with your peers. And sports at least after age 9 is almost all select teams. You live in a make the grade culture. And you will do your best to measure up.

Two is that leisure time is shrinking. People work 60 hours a week instead of 40. And this shrinks your available time to do anything not work or chores. With that shortage of time, every moment counts and therefore you feel pressured to show that you did not waste time.

The problem being that the government buys and uses so many computers and so much software that it often sets a standard for the industry. A standard that is a requirement for a group that can spend billions at a go when most other groups might spend a couple of million and individual users might spend a couple hundred dollars. For most companies it simply would not be worth spending the money to create a version that isn’t to government standards because of the economy of scale. Unless the entire rest of the customer base is willing to pay extra to not have that security, it simply makes sense to have your business make everything to government standards.

I think a lot of the cost disease is down to the way our laws insert themselves in every single decision made even in private companies. And these laws don’t regulate for outcome, but often for specific procedures whether or not they accomplish their actual goals or not. Thus when the construction companies encounter a problem, the law often dictates exactly how it’s handled, which often mean redoing things completely after ripping up the stuff already done, redoing the grading, etc. all of this while still paying wages, renting equipment or even renting specific equipment.

I think a huge part of this is the repeated lying. Just after the pandemic, when inflation started up, everyone was screaming from the housetops that this was a very temporary thing, a blip and due to pent up demand as the economy restarted. And during the pandemic as well, people were told not to notice that the economy wasn’t working right. So trust in officials and their statements of “the economy is just fine” have plummeted.

The other thing that’s happened is that our economy has bifurcated into the elite and the rest of us. The pandemic sped this up massively, but it’s been this way for some time. So there are two economies: one for the rich and elites for whom food costs and housing costs are trivial, and one for the workers struggling to make rent and buy food and after necessary expenses has nothing left. If you’re struggling, even after inflation related wages, to survive even after downgrading your lifestyle beyond the pain point, inflation is very very real to you. And given the struggles the economy for regular people is in the toilet. I’ve seen replies to stories about inflation not being real that detail the kinds of things that people have given up. Restaurants are simply no longer an option for a lot of people. They’ve canceled all their streaming services because they can’t afford them. They coupon and buy off brands or lower quality products, or simply do without. There’s a not insignificant portion of households that can no longer afford meat. But these are the peasants, and they aren’t to be listened to. If you’re rich, none of this matters to you and the economy is just fine. You might laugh about the cost of soup, but it’s not a lifestyle adjustment for you.

I think we’re talking past each other. To be blunt, my thesis is that these people know they cannot release a good product, and have been wrapping their rather poor offerings in Woke to cover it up. Benjamin Sisko was a badass. The show was entertaining and actually did deal with racism during its own time. It wasn’t exactly subtle when they had a story about a show very much like DS9 not being able to be published if it were known that the author was a black man. I don’t think they’d be able to write a story like that today — and the story itself is pretty woke — because it requires skill to produce a story like that. It requires skill to show rather than tell, it requires thought to make a woman an actual badass (Sara Conners) without having her whine about sexism.

Do women from persecuted middle eastern tribes have a reputation for being ugly? I'm not just talking Jews who have obviously been through a particularly weird diasporic selection process, but rather those other small minorities that have hung around in the region for thousands of years. I think breeding beautiful people is actually pretty hard, much harder than breeding smarter people. Perfect features exaggerated just a little too much become very quickly grotesque. Some unions produce beautiful sons and ugly daughters, or vice versa, often precisely because features that work for one sex don't for the other. Then consider the different status red headed men versus red headed women have in contemporary discourse on attractiveness, for example.

For those who stayed within the tribe, I would say yes. A woman who looks too good would be easily able to catch the eye of any powerful man, and thus would likely use that to their advantage by marrying into the dominant tribes. A pretty Palestinian girl can get a fairly nice lifestyle upgrade by marrying into an Israeli family. And in the more distant past Jews in Roman Palestinia could do well by seducing a Roman and being part of a fairly rich Roman household rather than marrying a poor Jewish boy.