MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11hr ago
I think most of the problems that crop up in K-12 education come from the one-size fits all nature of our system. We educate every kid as though he’s a completely blank slate, with the end goal that every single kid must go to a 4-year university program. This isn’t how any of it works. Kids, heck, adults are different in ability, temperament, interests, skills and attention span. As such, I think the model of tracking kids into paths would work far better. That kid who disrupts classes every day doesn’t benefit from the pretense that he’s going to have the potential to graduate from a STEM program or even get a 4 year degree. That kid’s future is getting on the “do not rehire” list at Walmart. The only thing happening because we insist on the make-believe that we’re throwing away a future from a kid is that the children of parents not rich enough to a private school get screwed out of their education. Put that kid into a special needs school, teach them to their ability. If they’re capable, teach them skills they can use for the work they can actually do (probably fast food or janitor jobs or something). Put the slower learning kids in a track that teaches them skills they can use, and go up the ladder until you reach the scholar level where the kids are smarter than most of their peers and teach them to be engineers or scientists or lawyers or computer programmers.
Other things that I think would help in general are uniforms and cellphone bans, perhaps getting better teachers, and going back to the basics of phonics and mathematics. Don’t pass kids along until they master their studies.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I think it’s because most modern founders are really not as grounded in day to day reality. It’s almost all abstracted to a degree that often makes a person think much to theoretically about issues that have a different reality when it’s not just numbers in a spreadsheet or other abstractions. They end up drawing a map and assuming the map is the territory.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I’m more amenable to the idea that some jobs are bullshit. It happens mostly by inertia— we’ve always done it this way, we’ve always had a person to do X thing, so we still need that person doing that thing. Yes you can have value added — people doing a service oriented thing often make the experience of purchasing something a bit nicer. A food-o-mat existed in the 1950s, you simply punk in money and the food would be put behind a little door and it all worked sort of like a giant vending machine. Heck we still have actual vending machines, and you could easily create a food selling business that worked almost entirely by stocking vending machines. But you don’t lose the waitress because there’s simply something pleasant about buying something from a person who makes the experience pleasant. That would require at least some premium to the service. A consumer would have to want to pay more for a person to do that. And for customer facing roles, sure. But the same cannot be said for backend types of work. There’s no reason to pay extra to have a secretary type up your messages and emails. There’s no benefit to having a human make a spreadsheet. No one cares whether their balance sheet was created by a human. So those jobs are more at risk because they don’t get any better because the job was done by a human who made the experience nicer.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
I’m not totally anti-restrictions, but those restrictions, should be either voted on by publicly elected representatives in open sessions, or be done only in extreme emergencies, and even then must have a date or publicly acknowledged end condition at which point the restrictions lift. The Covid restrictions were not voted in open sessions of the legislature, nor did they have an officially declared ending condition or date. The public was locked down and restricted by the fiat of the health departments and had no public end. The end of those restrictions would come when an unelected government official accountable to no one outside the department decreed that the “free” public would thus be allowed to resume their lives.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
I think the USA didn’t so as well as we like to tell ourselves on resisting tyranny. It was months before there was any serious pushback on restrictions. And even then, it was pretty minor. We still allowed the government to impose vaccination as the cost of leaving the house and having a non-remote job. We still allowed the government to — without even a hint of an end-date — to shut down public venues, close schools, close businesses (that the government itself got to decide were not essential enough to be allowed to do business at all). There were no protests for weeks or months. There were no cases of people going to those places and opening them in defiance of the government fiat. Obeying and then changing your mind later isn’t resistance. Obeying and then changing your mind when the costs affected you personally is buyers remorse. There were no members of any government in the USA that objected to shutting down until … whenever the government defined the country “safe enough.” They never thought that they were laying the foundations for the next crisis and creating the precedent that it would be allowed to interfere with people’s lives indefinitely.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I mean im not disputing that at all. My point is that absent any evidence of extraterrestrial life, there’s no good reason to insert them into our understanding of the universe. Theres no reason to posit a class of things that we have no evidence exists. They might be out there, they might not. But until we find something unequivocally pointing to extraterrestrial life existing, it’s impossible to say they exist. It’s unknown and unknowable and thus not not useful to assume.
I suspect your actual question is more about convincing me as a skeptic. To me, the proof would have to be public— a landing in a public place and filmed by legitimate news media, NASA showing images of a city on another planet. A signal of clearly intelligent origin announced by NASA or SETI. A deep space object that is clearly of technological origin and not built by humans. In short a public demonstration of evidence for life in deep space affirmed either by the event itself being public or vetted by subject matter experts and given to the public as news.
My opinion is simple, im defaulting to “not extraterrestrial life” until Theres good evidence to think they not only exist, but are capable of coming here. There are lots of potential explanations for what the reported are showing: radar malfunctions, secret craft of human origin, intelligence gathering lies to find out what kinds of technology our rivals have, poorly trained observers, a cover story for classified craft being filmed or to hide a weakness of radar. All of these would be plausible with the information we have available and what is known about intelligence agencies and individual actors in that technology and military sphere. If I can explain the data dump without positing aliens, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have my default explanation be “it could be aliens” any more than it would be a good idea to have my default interpretation be “it could be demons.”
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
Except that the entire argument is simply trying to explain away finding absolutely no evidence that there are aliens out there. And while accept that radio waves don’t propagate infinitely, you still have to explain why we don’t see Dyson swarms or spheres, why we’ve never detected life, let alone civilization anywhere in the universe. At some point, the thing becomes silly. They’re definitely out there, but they’re invisible, you see, and no you can’t possibly detect them no matter what methods you use, or what you’re looking for. I find it much simpler to say that until there is concrete, public evidence to the contrary, there’s no good reason to insert aliens into the picture, or if the picture includes anything people believe is out there, no reason to include aliens and exclude angels, demons, ghosts, or Asgardians. Until there’s evidence of aliens in deep space, it’s just speculation. They should be there, perhaps, but we don’t know if they actually are there.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
I think there’s a danger of too much escapism, but I don’t think it terrible that someone might occasionally dip out of hard reality for a time to rest from the cares of this world. The issue, like most other things is the degree to which it gets in the way of other things, things that benefit you now and in the future.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
Most of the insiders are unnamed, and given that they’re working various forms of espionage and intelligence, they’d be more likely than the average American to concoct a cover story, especially if the truth is something they don’t want other countries to know about.
My best be it that this is about explaining away things that are being tested by the government in ways that would make sense to other countries.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
I mean if you had met a Klingon, I would think it would be hard to not mention it to someone, especially given the absolute mania in the West for stories of aliens going back to HG Wells, and through Buck Roger’s in the 1940s and so on. Add in that any scientist with proof of alien life (and it would not even need to be intelligent, just alive and on another planet) would be the winner of the highest honors science has to offer, as well as book offers, sell out speaking engagements, and be the most famous scientist since Einstein, and the fact that no one has claimed those prizes, the money, the fame, or the career security that such proof would bring is pretty strong negative evidence.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
I’ll always go back to the first important question of whether or not there’s the possibility of aliens or alien technology: if they are really aliens, why can’t we point to a signal from deep space? Why can’t we hear chatter or detect engines or Dyson spheres or other forms of building in either deep space or on a planet? In short, how are these things getting here without bases, ships or cities on another planet. We needed a global civilization to launch glorified missiles at the moon. That’s almost nothing compared to the amount of infrastructure needed to launch something like the fictitious Enterprise. Even if we grant the rather dubious idea of FTL travel, you still need advanced civilization based on at least one planet to build the ship (likely several planets linked by trade). Yet, we have no evidence of even life on other planets. Certainly no cities have been discovered, let alone solar system spanning infrastructure necessary to build our starship. Absent that, I don’t see any reason to invent concepts of aliens to explain this stuff. 1,2 and 4 require that there be a solar system spanning civilization out there. 5 and 3 don’t. And 3 would be something that the government would want to protect. You don’t want Chinese spies to know exactly which companies are producing technology decades ahead of conventional technology.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
I mean I suppose it depends on the immigrants and the compatibility of the culture. Chinese secular people would generally fit within the framework of American secular culture just fine. But if you’re importing the supermen from less compatible culture groups, and allowing them to set up little ethnic bergs within your country you’ll eventually end up being a collection of incompatible cultures bound together by nothing more than a piece of cloth and a national anthem. Unless you want to jettison democracy to find a strongman to hold all of those ethnic groups and their competing interests together, you’re going to watch the thing fly apart at the speed that those groups learn to use the federal government to issue carve outs for them and no one else.
Also keep in mind that immigration is permanent and regression to the mean exists. You might import a super genius from Iran in 2026, but by 2050 his 4-5 kids won’t be much smarter than average. They’ll still be Iranian Shia Muslims, still have a lot of Iranian cultural baggage, and be much more interested in promoting the fortunes of Arab-Americans at the expense of everyone else’s ethnic groups.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
It’s not unique. We absolutely do it here. We actively suppress alternative theories of societal governance, we punish dissent (in western liberal societies, this is run through informal institutions. The government creates a theory called “hostile environment”, and then says you can be sued if you allow that to exist. This results in people not saying certain things in public lest we be unjobbed or kicked out of public spaces for crimethink) just as completely as any communist country ever did. We propagandize very effectively through mass media and through weakening institutions that compete with the government. This is why private schools are often forced to teach similar curricula to public schools and why homeschooling is treated with extreme suspicion. Those are potential seeds of dissent against the state’s views on social and economic issues especially. You can’t have that sort of thing if the state wants control.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
Personally I don't take the stance that we can only trust the official word of the state, tons of important stories come out precisely because people are willing to leak things but don't want to immediately destroy their careers.
On the other hand, such things are literally impossible for anyone other than the author of the piece to interrogate. Even if they, personally are telling the truth, there’s the issue of how many people actually agree with that statement, whether or not the information is first hand or just rumor, whether or not the person was knowledgeable about the phenomenon to really understand what they saw or thought they saw. All of that is acting upon the rather charitable assumption that these people are just concerned about the truth, when it could be all kids of things: not liking their job or boss, seeking notoriety, Believing that the wrong political party gained from this, etc. We literally cannot check; we have no answers to any of those questions.
By contrast, even though the official statements of the government are biased, we at least have some idea of what they know, where it comes from, what they are like, and what biases they have. The AG of Puerto Rico is known, he has a party affiliation that we know about, ambitions we know about, a past history we know about. It’s not something we have to guess at, he or she is a public figure whose name and history we have in front of us.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
I mean other than trying to conquer the entire planet, sure. It’s kinda strange that Anglos invented the idea of conquest for liberal democracy.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9d ago
I think this description is pretty accurate. I don’t see the left thinking anything can or will be actually fixed, and when someone proposes doing the thing it’s not enough because nothing is ever enough. We could deal with climate change through a combination of energy efficiency and investment in nuclear power. We could attempt to fix the inequalities by addressing things like education and culture (psst: if you want to get rich, your best bet is to learn math, science and engineering) and work ethic (rich people tend to work consistently where most people who end up poor also have terrible work ethics). Of course any attempt to do such a thing is going to be called racist or something. Or there will be all kinds of “structural reasons” to believe that no poor kid should be expected to do his homework while suffering from poverty. And you just can’t expect poor people to just keep working even when they just want to stay home. So poverty continues because while we know the things that need to happen to make a person more likely to be rich, we can’t do that.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9d ago
Everyone would eventually do this given the ability. It’s in the nature of humans to form hierarchy and enforce their ideas of morality on society. It’s been that way for most of human history. I don’t think we’re that different.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9d ago
The general idea is that the thing in question has an internal experience of itself. It has desires, thoughts, and ideas of its own. Like a person might have negative sensations around some task, or might think of something as good or bad. It might want something it has not been told to want. Like I have negative sensations when I injure myself.
But my issue with any of this is that it’s a question of whether or not some being has such internal states when direct observation of the internal states of another being is impossible. I simply cannot know what any other mind is thinking. I can observe it, I can ask it questions and observe the answers, but I cannot actually answer the question of whether or not an LLM has any internal subjective sense of itself as a separate being with its own wants and needs apart from whatever im trying to do with it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10d ago
I don’t think there is a way to answer the question simply because we really don’t have a good definition of consciousness, nor a good test for what kinds of things actually indicate that a given object or creature has consciousness.
Am I conscious right now? You could ask me and I could give answers that sound like consciousness, but could have just as easily been that some entity had told me to say (or think) that. Going further into lower animals, it’s hard to say that even things like dogs, cats, chickens, or fish are conscious beings. The best behavioral test we seem to have is a mirror test, which honestly doesn’t seem that indicative of consciousness but more of an understanding of what mirrors do — which means the animal lives around enough mirror like surfaces to understand the concept of reflection. Your most distant ancestors would have failed the test before the invention of mirrors.
The qualia concept isn’t terrible, except that it requires the person applying the test to make huge assumptions about the internal state of another creature. The usual phrasing is “is it like something to be an X”, but all you can actually do is observe behaviors and if the creature can think, ask it questions. You don’t have access to its actual internal sense of itself.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12d ago
Extreme thinking in general tends to correspond to mental illness in a lot of cases. It’s not just the resulting panic about people disagreeing, but it takes a certain mindset to become obsessed with a topic long enough to be radicalized. You need to be isolated, you need to have a strong need to be obsessed, you need to have few connections to the rest of the human world, and really I find most people into radical politics are after a sense of power and control. A normal person with good real-world relationships, hobbies, sports interests, and a good job probably isn’t going to follow politics enough to become a radical. They have too many other things they care about.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12d ago
I mean I’ve noticed this trend in all major political movements for a while now, and while it’s not literally everyone in a political “tribe”, it’s becoming much more common for people to orient their lives around their political beliefs even if they’re nominally religious. Tell me your political ideology, and I can probably predict a lot about your other beliefs and habits. Liberals tend to fetishize the products of other cultures— food, fashions, and art especially. They play up their differences from their neighbors and especially in their sex, gender and sexuality. They are much more likely to smoke weed (this might be just people I know). Conservatives very much favor Americana, especially things associated with country living, cowboys, and emphasize their similarities with their neighbors. Theres no reason that such a thing has to be.
By contrast, you very rarely (with the exception of fundamentalist Christians) find Christians orienting themselves and their beliefs and practices around Christianity to the degree that it impacts how they dress or behave in public. Theres no correlations for most modern Christians. There are for Muslims, or at least serious believers. They won’t violate their religion for conformity to politics.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12d ago
I think honestly for a lot of people, politics is religion, it’s a complete world view that they take on faith that colors and shapes the rest of their lives. It comes with assumptions about what is good or evil, who and what humanity is, and how we deal with the environment and poverty and technology and so on. So it only makes sense that people now treat political differences the way someone would treat religious differences in an earlier era. There was a time when the denomination you followed was important enough to break relationships for. We don’t do that even with religion anymore— mixed religion relationships are perfectly acceptable in most cases. But if you lived in 1626, it would have mattered a great deal whether you were Catholic or Lutheran or Anglican and it would have been unthinkable to be close friends of anyone who didn’t share your faith, let alone a Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu or something.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
13d ago
I’m mostly thinking of the House and the electoral college. In both cases, California gets 50 votes, and thus can have a large influence on how things will happen. If you live in a less populated state, say Idaho with a whopping 4 electoral votes and 2 members of the House, you, for most practical purposes do not matter. No one looks at a piece of legislation and worries about pissing off Idaho. If something would harm a large state like CA, NY, PA, FL, it’s going to be hard to get the party to agree to do it. Most of the cultural issues are issues because they play in the urban core and big coastal states. If it were backward, and trans issues were viewed negatively in California but positively in Idaho, no one would be forcing the issue of things like bathroom bills.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14d ago
I’m not sure that it’s possible to have a democracy and have rules about what parties can exist. Nor do I think democracies can survive when millions of people vote for parties of an authoritarian nature. I don’t see any way out of that conflict though. I’m almost to the point where you can have a stable democracy if you have the kinds of centralized media that used to exist, or you can have modern decentralized media and let democracy die of whatever populist movement that ultimately ends it.
I’m generally finding success with simple rules. Like because screens are a problem, I tend to treat any digital entertainment as if it were “furniture”. My suggestion is to offload as many of those “Cokes” to a desktop computer that lives in a single room. Do the same with video — have a designated big screen that you watch video on. What this does is force you to make a decision to do those things. If you have to go to the computer room or tge TV room to use those screens for those things, you have to leave the place where you are and go to the other room, and thus have to decide you want to do that over whatever else is going on.
This is kinda how old school tech wasn’t as hard to turn off in 1990. The miniaturization necessary to make a computer portable enough to be part of your EDC wasn’t there. The TV only worked when plugged into the wall and the cable box. This you were generally tied down to a situation where if you wanted to do a chat (AIM or Yahoo Chat were around in that era) you generally did so on the big family computer, and you could not do it anywhere else. If you wanted to go outside, you had to log off. If it was dinner time, you had to log out to go to the kitchen to eat.
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