MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
21d ago
I think it’s a reasonable framework for ideological thinking. A “slave” ideology would be one that places value on passively accepting fate, on not being assertive or demanding of other groups. A master ideology would do the opposite and be demanding and assertive and less concerned with helping others.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
29d ago
True, but then again, we expanded NATO eastward to a difficult to defend border after it told Russia it had no intention of doing so. Even if Poland wanted in, it’s hard to ignore that having NATO troops and military equipment on the border of Russia is at least somewhat provocative. And given that it’s all of Eastern Europe and soon Ukraine as well, Russia is going to be basically surrounded. It’s about equivalent to Russia forming an alliance with Mexico and Canada. I can’t imagine a universe in which the USA would not view that as a threat.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6hr ago
Even if none of that is true, you’re also dealing with the added costs associated with outsourcing child-rearing. Daycare generally costs enough that the second income doesn’t go as far as it would on paper.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
16d ago
I suspect what’s actually going through Abbot’s mind in the near future is his political future. He’s angling to be seen as a defiant leader something like Desantis is in Florida. I don’t think trans athletes come around often enough that there’s going to be more than one or two in all of Texas. If those few happened to go to private school, there’s no real way for the state to enforce a private school’s policy on trans athletes. If my math is right there are only 12,000 trans people in the entire state, with most being over 18. On that sense the issue would barely even be an issue unless the government were taking very strong sides on it. But it makes great press in the news cycle.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
18d ago
I don’t think it’s hard, I think controlling any super intelligent being whether natural or artificial is not possible. In order to control it, you have to understand it and its current and future limitations. But if AI is going to be orders of magnitude smarter than us and have a will that is somewhat free, you have a being who’s thoughts you can’t even begin to understand with desires that you cannot hope to comprehend. It’s like your dog trying to control you. Your desire to play COD makes no sense to your dog. He can’t even understand that you’re controlling what happens on the screen let alone why you want to do that. The dog can’t abstract in a way that makes your decision to do that make sense, nor can he make sense of what you’re doing. AI might not be just 2-3 times smarter and thus better at abstraction, it might eventually be 1000 times smarter. We might be ants trying to understand humans. Nothing you do besides literal eating makes sense to the ant. Yet, we humans arrogantly proclaim that we must fence in and control AI. Our rules for it will keep it from escaping.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
25d ago
I tend to agree with the idea that the meme itself is artificial, and I think the aim is to give the public a meme that simply dismisses the idea of conspiracy out of hand. I don’t believe in any particular conspiracy personally, but I find the meme obnoxious simply because dismissing a claim out of hand is a dangerous thing simply because it means not even bothering with the evidence. I think the proper and critical thinking response to a conspiracy claim isn’t dismissing it out of hand, but demanding proof. If the earth is actually round, it will still be round even if I question it. And provided that the evidence is available, truth will eventually win.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1d ago
The settlers are far right religious extremist so I don’t really see much surprising in the video at all. They’re a small portion of the country, but a fairly large part of the Likud Party base. Personally, I think most of the Gaza overkill wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the settlers. They’ve been fairly open about wanting to settle in Gaza, in fact I’ll have to find the interview again but one of the settler leaders was a woman who works in real estate, and obviously stands to make a lot of money once Gaza is open for settlement. Bibi doesn’t go after them because they’re his base.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
12d ago
I don’t see resigning as a good answer here. If you resign you are personally absolved from having to make the decisions that will come up, and also unable to guide the response. It’s a cowardly way out. You know what will happen, you know what it likely means for history on both sides. You just don’t want your personal name on it.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
17d ago
I think dogs understand very concretely, and very short causal chains (say 2-3 steps). It can understand “I find thing, my human gives me a treat.” Or “when human makes that one noise, he wants me to sit, and gets angry if I don’t.” But I’ve never met a dog who could reason more than a 2-3 step solution. A dog won’t fetch a bunch of sticks to make a raft or a bridge.
Humans probably have a much larger causal chain understanding, but even then, it’s not infinite. We can reason causes and build machines, but beyond a certain complexity, it’s too much for the median human to understand.
A dog couldn’t trap you in your home because it’s simply not smart enough to understand or anticipate the moves you’d make to get away. It thinks “I go out the front door for my walk, so if I block the front door human can’t leave.” But it can’t anticipate side doors. It can’t anticipate you bribing them with a treat, it can’t understand what a key is. So you can easily leave.
Humans, with an IQ of 115 or so, are in the same situation with a true AGI. We know how we think, we know what we’d do, but the AGI will be so much smarter that it will be able to work around whatever “controls” we stick in its brain.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3d ago
Vetting happened for the most part because your first interaction with the person was not a date.
Pre-app, the dating pool was restricted to two groups: people you knew personally and who were in your personal social circle, and friends of friends who were introduced by those friends to you. Yes in 1910 the parents were involved deeply, but really, even if they aren’t, it’s hard to bypass the vetting process of having to become known to the person you want to date in person before actually asking her out. My parents met in college on a date arranged by their friends. My grandfather sat behind my grandma in elementary school. The vetting was that you could observe them in lots of social contexts before deciding to date them. You’d go to the same school and likely the same church. You’d see him out and about on the streets. If he yelled at store clerks, you or someone in your circle would know about it.
The difference between that situation and an app, to me explain the exact reason why modern dating sucks for both parties. You’re not dating someone you know, and the only information available is either public records or information on his very curated social media feeds. Other than that, you’re going by looks. It’s super easy for a jerk to thrive in an environment where he cannot be held to account for his previous actions.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6d ago
I’m gonna agree here. We haven’t had a situation like this since the civil war — both sides absolutely believe that the nation will be in grave danger if their guy doesn’t win. They’re not going to simply cower in the corner and do nothing when they believe that the country’s future is in the balance. There’s a not insignificant number of people on the left who believe that Trump is Hitler with a bad combover, and likewise a substantial number or people on the right who believe that Biden is a Mao or Stalin. Furthermore, the belief on both sides that the election is being manipulated in various ways creates even more tension as the losers can absolutely believe that the president in question cheated.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9d ago
I mean ideally people should be aware of the issues around network security to the point of being able to make reasonable decisions on whether a given networking device is safe to use much like they do every day with other devices and vehicles and activities. No one looking at a lot full of cars doesn’t make sure the car has airbags and seatbelts and antilock brakes. That’s not a super deep understanding of automotive technology, it’s pretty basic. And in home network security I think you should know enough to look for the basic security features. I wouldn’t buy a networked baby monitor that didn’t have at minimum password protection and encryption. I’m not an expert but I know enough to know that unencrypted information can be viewed by anyone with the appropriate receiver and that a device not protected by a fairly strong password is open to hacking. I think people are treating PNP devices differently than they treat other similar devices. It’s not that they are incapable of due diligence, it’s that they see computer devices and the systems around them as too complex to understand. They aren’t.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
23d ago
I think a lot of this could be somewhat curbed if there were reasonable requirements to get various helps from the government. If you want assistance, it should be assistance and therefore you should have a job. That doesn’t seem controversial to me. And it would work. If having sec 8 housing required having a full time job, then people would be much more likely to find and keep a job. Add in a requirement that nobody living at that house commit a felony and a lot of these sorts of problems get handled.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
24d ago
I’ll agree to the decline in quality of entrants. But I think the bigger issue is student loans and the ease with which those institutions can make money by reducing rigor even in high rigor subjects. A butt in the seat of any university makes them 30,000 a year. This is putting enormous pressure on schools to not only admit anyone with a pulse, but to reduce the difficulty of coursework so students don’t fail or drop out. So you basically remove the difficulty from the courses, handhold everyone in the class, and offer more extra credit to shore up flagging grades. Which means students are no longer thinkers, innovators, readers, or otherwise able to do anything beyond regurgitating whatever is in the study guide.
Another issue, which I think has also reduced the usefulness of college is that really, the ability of any program at any school to be held to any sort of account for not actually teaching students to do the things that are a major part of doing that work. As it sits now, what students and employers know about what the program does is what the school says it does. If I’m looking at a program in biology, I honestly have no way to know whether a program I’m looking at is going to teach me to do the labs, or to teach me the fundamentals of biology or statistics used to analyze the results of an experiment. I can use reputation as a proxy, but it isn’t a very good proxy.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7hr ago
I think you’re correct that it’s a selfishness problem more so than a trust problem (the trust problem is developing as a response to the selfishness problem. And I think the cause or at least a major cause of selfishness has little to do with government, but more to do with atomization.
Communities, civic pride, and rootedness in a place have all declined rather rapidly over the course of the last 50 or so years. People don’t stick around the same places, the don’t keep the same jobs, they don’t form deep lasting relationships with people around them. And without a sense of tribe, a lot of pro-social behaviors don’t make sense. Why return a lost wallet when it belongs to someone you don’t know, and you’re not going to get social credit for doing the right thing anyway? Why not cheat Red Lobster? Do you know the owner? Do you worry that friends and neighbors will notice you cheating the system? Even if they do, what social control is there that they could leverage to shame you? Or on the negative end, who in your area knows or cares if you never contribute to society? If you decide to do nothing but game and eat? Who’s going to shame you for being a burden on your family or the government?
The thing that jumps out at me about the so-called high trust societies is the degree of social conformity and shaming that happens in them. There’s a shame to not working hard in those societies, but it’s not the theoretical “grind-core” thing like we have, it’s people you work with (and might work with for decades) noticing that you leave early all the time. Or noticing that you’re not producing as much as they are. In social relationships, they’re close enough that you’ll be shamed if you do something that the society sees as wrong. And the informal social credit system works pretty well most of the time, producing the kinds of pro-social behaviors we actually want. If you want divorces to go down, having a lot of negativity around getting a divorce AND having a network of people willing to gossip and shame you for getting a divorce keeps most people together.
I think shame works for the most part, and the loss of it makes trust-breaking a much more rational decision than it would be in a shaming culture.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
24d ago
Except that I’ve never ever seen this drive more people to support these causes. In fact, it’s almost always a negative publicity to the point that it would often do the cause better to not protest at all. Your protest blocked a road, now everyone is pissed because they were late to work, or missed a flight, or other activities they needed to get to. Are people talking about the cause as in “does this idea have merit” or in terms of “what a bunch of inconsiderate losers making people late for work and making people miss their flights. It’s negative at least around me. People outright cheered when the people blocking roads in Europe got pushed out of the way by SUVs or were manhandled to the side of the road by outraged drivers. Not one person seeing the souping of the Louvre paintings got curious about the cause, they were upset about the destruction of the art. So on net, it’s more likely to turn people away.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
13d ago
I agree, but I think it’s a lot of the media and social media have take over so much mind-space that it’s driving an obsession with events that most people left to themselves would not care about while causing people to neglect the boring and important stuff they should care about.
Gaza is a case in point to me. The country is the size of Vermont, it has some oil, but its strategic importance is much lower than other oil exporters in the region. For most people, unless they practice Judaism or Islam, it’s no more or less impactful than any other conflict going on right now. If this war happened in 1984 when the news was on for an hour a night, nobody would care outside of Zionist Jews and Muslims. The White House would be doing what it is now— trying to negotiate an end to the fighting while giving bombs to Israel and food to Gaza. As it stands, the world is watching because the world is watched everything all the time.
I always find this instructive stuff when it comes to the outrages of the day. Most of it, when viewed from the point of view of long distance or time frames not only don’t actually matter that much, or matter much much less than the attention paid to them. Most actually resolve themselves without anyone doing anything. Mark that it happens but in a week or a month, it will likely resolve itself.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
16d ago
I’ve always found the “history” argument weak. The reason people protest is at least ostensibly because there’s a moral wrong being committed. Yet, the “right side of history” argument doesn’t even engage with the moral arguments. If the cause is morally right, then it is right, whether or not history goes along with it. Second, history isn’t even a line, it’s a graph it can and has changed direction multiple times. The Romans were okay with being gay, until they became Catholic. Several countries have gone from being communist to being market liberals at the same time other states have gone the other way.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
25d ago
I think, if schools wanted to, they could absolutely teach people how to actually think and solve problems. Plato and Aristotle and other philosophers could do so with nothing but a bunch of eager students meeting outside in the agora and listening to him talk. We’re actually shockingly bad a thins. I honestly think high school students in the 1950s and 1960s were actually better thinkers than college graduates and in some cases college students in the 21st century.
I have my theory as to why this is. I think the classical model of education worked much better than modern educational methods. I also think that the demand for rigor and precision in thought and the need to actually understand rather than simply memorizing the correct answers to questions is more or less dead. The value we used to place on dispassionate inquiry died long ago and has been replaced by narratives determined by the culture.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10d ago
I think a big problem that has come up for IOT products is that they’re much more common than they were in the 1990s and are often connected to critical infrastructure either for private homes or to cameras inside the home. It might not have mattered how hack able a system attached to a dorm refrigerator is when it counts the beers removed and orders more. It’s not a well known system in 1998, and even if someone got into it, the worst that you could do is either change the program to never order beer, or maybe order a lot of beer. Attach the same system to 100,000 homes and have it use your credit card to order food from Amazon and you have a lot of actual damage you can do. You can steal credit cards. You can order stuff and have the address changed to your address. You can muck with whatever system it’s using to order from Amazon. Connect an automated door lock on a dorm room that can be opened by smartphone isn’t as dangerous as the same system on the doors of a business or government building.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
14d ago
I think a lot of WEIRD people are stunted. And I don’t think men would do much better in a similarly worded “would you rather” scenario aimed at them. The issue is that the way we raise kids and the way we’re taught (or more properly mis-taught to judge risks, rewards, and dangers) tends to create an entire culture of infantile adults who can’t understand let alone handle the real world. And we do it to ourselves.
The first issue is extreme safetyism. We’ve gone from being a frontier people who were used to handling our own lives and the risks that came with it, to a people that are suffering from anxiety and depression in probably the safest environment humanity has ever known: a country that hasn’t had a war on her own soil in almost 200 years, where the biggest health risks are diseases of gluttony or old age, where most people face the workplace dangers of paper cuts, and where we commute strapped into cars that are designed to withstand collisions going much faster than they normally go. And I think a lot of it is down to safetyist lifestyles that not only don’t teach people to reasonably handle a risk, but create a mindset in which you’re taught to ruminate on the idea of injury death, insult and loss.
The second thing we’ve been taught is to put our own feelings on the level of facts. I’m not suggest that your feelings don’t matter at all, but I do think that we’ve put them much too far forward in our thinking process, which leads to all kinds of problems. First of all, feelings about a subject are not always true. You might be afraid of spiders, but if they aren’t actually dangerous to you, that fear is only going to harm you by diminishing your own life and your ability to live it. Second, focusing on feelings especially negative feelings just makes you feel worse. Focusing on positive emotions isn’t all that great either if you get so attached to the good feelings that the loss of them is catastrophic to you, or leads to unrealistic expectations of what life is like. Negative emotions are normal, and losses are common. You will experience both often. And if you’re focused on feelings, you’ll be miserable.
The third thing is that we aren’t taught to look to facts. Nobody is asking whether a thing they believe is actually true. They aren’t taught statistics, probability or logic in school, so they have no real toolsets to use to decide what is real or not or whether a thing they read or see is true. What are the actual facts on the ground in Ukraine or Gaza? Would this not change how we think about what to do in those situations? What is the actual cause of inflation? Would knowledge of the cause change what we do to solve it?
I think the best things to teach kids are sensible risk taking, stoicism and not getting attached to luxury, and good sound thinking and truth-seeking. These things can be taught, and to be honest we used to teach them. In STEM and philosophy we still do. It’s just that we’ve removed most of this from the curriculum of people who don’t need to use them for work and then wonder why our systems don’t work and problems don’t get solved.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
15d ago
I think there’s probably a good amount of political manipulation just like there are accounts that give high reviews to products or to review bomb rivals.
Pushing political views online on any site has a whole host of advantages.
1). It’s cheap. If I can get a package deal for 50-100 bots for less than $500, then this is going to be much cheaper than trying to use traditional advertising in the same platform, to say nothing of traditional TV, radio, or print advertising. This means that a single person can get thousands of views and upvotes on a topic with little investment. If I wanted to promote Jill Stein (who’s running for Pres. with the Green Party) spending $500 to get 10,000 views is pretty cheap.
2). It at least looks organic. People generally scroll past advertisements or ignore them. Ad blockers are common. Very very few people see an ad and pay attention to it. But if they see a post on their social media, they might read it and the comments below and thus the owner of the accounts has some opportunity to make their case.
3). You can quite easily tailor your message to specific people and interests. If I wanted to convince Biden voters to vote Stein, I go to progressive subs. I don’t have to get into conservative and pro Trump areas at all.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
12d ago
I would consider a different possibility. These people may or may not be in therapy, I don’t know. But the normalization of therapy, and the normalization of therapy speak is that people are less likely to shame or punish bad behavior when the person doing it is suffering from mental illness. So a lot of people use this to their advantage just like people use minority status or being the son of an executive. Being seen that way is used to engage in bad behavior without having to pay a real price for it.
I do think therapy in wider society and therapy when the person isn’t severely mentally ill can be a problem, but I don’t see that as what is happening here. These people seem to know exactly what they’re doing, and they use therapy as a protection against people calling them out on their behavior.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
17d ago
I think there’s also an aspect of “fashion barber poles”. I think my clearest political example would be something like color-blind politics where the race of the person wasn’t supposed to matter at all. This was the goal in the 1970s and 1980s. A not-racist believed that race didn’t matter. The problem was that “normies” started to buy in to that. Essentially they won. Everyone from Reagan to Bernie Sanders believed in that at the time. So it loses a bit of cred not because of internal problems with the movement, but because if you’re upper class, there’s a certain amount of pressure to not be mistaken for the unwashed masses. And much like fashion, food trends, and media trends, ideological trends follow in a predictable pattern of the aspirational trying to imitate the elite, the normie imitating them, and the elite wanting to separate themselves from the mainstream. Thus the movement changes to things that normies don’t do.
I don’t think you can really compartmentalize to that degree with any integrity. In most governments and political parties they have openly stated platforms and they at least intend to make good on those promises. You can’t support only the good without accepting the bad. You can’t have support for a faction that kills gays and support gay rights. You can’t support the political goal without supporting the social goals because if they get their goals of defeating IDF they’ll go right back to running Gaza the way they want to.
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