MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
3d 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
5d 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
5d 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
6d 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
6d 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.
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.
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