Sinity
1yr ago
There's plenty on nonreligious metaphysical reasons to value existence. Chiefly that you can't value things if you don't exist.
But in more utilitarian terms, any undermining of the value of life make you a possible victim. It could be me or my loved ones being gauded into suicide, and I want society to be constructed on a way that makes that unlikely enough.
Rejecting the value of individual's freedom to die also makes you a possible victim.
MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain
In 2049 it became known that MMAcevedo was being widely shared and experimented upon without Acevedo's permission. Acevedo's attempts to curtail this proliferation had the opposite of the intended effect. A series of landmark U.S. court decisions found that Acevedo did not have the right to control how his brain image was used, with the result that MMAcevedo is now by far the most widely distributed, frequently copied, and closely analysed human brain image.
Acevedo died from coronary heart failure in 2073 at the age of 62. It is estimated that copies of MMAcevedo have lived a combined total of more than 152,000,000,000 subjective years in emulation. If illicit, modified copies of MMAcevedo are counted, this figure increases by an order of magnitude.
MMAcevedo is considered by some to be the "first immortal", and by others to be a profound warning of the horrors of immortality.
As the earliest viable brain scan, MMAcevedo is one of a very small number of brain scans to have been recorded before widespread understanding of the hazards of uploading and emulation. As such, unlike the vast majority of emulated humans, the emulated Miguel Acevedo boots with an excited, pleasant demeanour.
MMAcevedo's demeanour and attitude contrast starkly with those of nearly all other uploads taken of modern adult humans, most of which boot into a state of disorientation which is quickly replaced by terror and extreme panic. Standard procedures for securing the upload's cooperation such as red-washing, blue-washing, and use of the Objective Statement Protocols are unnecessary. This reduces the necessary computational load required in fast-forwarding the upload through a cooperation protocol, with the result that the MMAcevedo duty cycle is typically 99.4% on suitable workloads, a mark unmatched by all but a few other known uploads.
In current times, MMAcevedo still finds extensive use in research, including, increasingly, historical and linguistics research. In industry, MMAcevedo is generally considered to be obsolete, due to its inappropriate skill set, demanding operational requirements and age. Despite this, MMAcevedo is still extremely popular for tasks of all kinds, due to its free availability, agreeable demeanour and well-understood behaviour. It is estimated that between 6,500,000 and 10,000,000 instances of MMAcevedo are running at any given moment in time.
Sinity
1yr ago
I think this isn't charitable enough to those who do want to commit suicide. I haven't checked metrics on who regrets committing it vs not, and I do believe that there has to be some barrier to entry. But it's not easy to do far simpler things like dig road rash out of my own skin or cut away lesions. There's a reason why so many people thought it was amazing when that guy sawed off his leg to escape being trapped by a boulder. I do believe that you can absolutely want to commit suicide in a real way but fumble the execution.
IDK. How can you fumble, say, accelerating to VMAX and hitting a tree?
Sinity
1yr ago
The "Dead Internet Theory" doesn't feel like a theory anymore. The Motte is an obscure space with discussion levels high enough you notice if an actor isn't actually thinking or engaging with what's been said... and 2 out of 15 comments in that thread were Fairly undeniably bots....
The Motte is obscure, yes. Also, its userbase contains plenty of people who might want (and ability to), for whatever reason, launch GPT-3 bots or something.
What the hell must it be like on other forums? Newspaper comments? YouTube comments?
Well... Why the future is now and it's scarier than you think
Sinity
1yr ago
I translated fun fragment of the irc log (link to a pastebin containing it is in "Some news coverage").
120123.070109 <+hrhrhrhr> they shut down the server ;]
120123.071050 <+hrhrhrhr> do you know what was the password?
120123.071052 <+hrhrhrhr> we got in
120123.071055 <+hrhrhrhr> we break the hash
120123.071056 <+hrhrhrhr> and behold
120123.071058 <+hrhrhrhr> admin1
120123.071059 <+hrhrhrhr> ahahahahaa
120123.071100 <+k0stek> they swapped index [file?]
120123.071100 <+hrhrhr> xD
120123.071102 <+corror> kurwa
120123.072933 <+k0stek> hrhrhrhr but admit you wouldn't guess such a password :D
120123.072942 <+hrhrhr> dude
120123.072946 <+hrhrhrhr> we were thinking hard xD
120123.072952 <+hrhrhrhr> we found a bypass to the panel
120123.072955 <+hrhrhrhr> and there, sql injection
120123.072955 <+hrhrhrhr> xd
120123.072959 <+corror> and then here is, such a password
120123.073003 <+hrhrhrhr> and it [SQL] was so twisted
120123.073005 <+hrhrhrhr> fuck me
120123.073006 <+hrhrhrhr> ;d
120123.073011 <+hrhrhrhr> this SQL was fucked up
120123.073018 <+hrhrhrhr> and so, we're pulling passwords
120123.073021 <+hrhrhrhr> we break the hash
120123.073041 <+hrhrhrhr> and it was admin:admin1
120123.073047 <+hrhrhrhr> admin;admin1
120123.073047 <+hrhrhrhr> xd
Sinity
1yr ago
AI is pretty much only going to harm visual artists. It's not going to "help them make better art", it's going to replace them, because people used to need artists to draw X and now they don't. One guy might get a productivity boost from using AI, but that's not going to do much for the other 10 people who got laid off.
Yes, in a similar way that (machine) computers harmed (human) computers.
Also it will change everything in similar ways. Explosion of amount of computations : explosion of amount of visual media. Someone still needs to decide, ultimately, what is desired out of given piece of media. Someone needs to program computers as well.
But yeah, we don't need human computers anymore, and programmers don't do much (explicit) calculations using their brains.
Sinity
1yr ago
Ofc judges can decide whatever. But there's no way they're going to side with the artists, destroying AI tech. It'd be just yielding to China.
Ignoring practicalities, it just doesn't make any sense. Why couldn't you train AI on copyrighted works while still able to train your own biological neural network on them?
Sinity
1yr ago
Therefore I wonder - is this all a load of crap?
IMO definitely. Scientific Freud
In this month’s American Journal of Psychiatry: The Efficacy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and Psychodynamic Therapy in the Outpatient Treatment of Major Depression: A Randomized Clinical Trial. It’s got more than just a catchy title. It also demonstrates that…
Wait. Before we go further, a moment of preaching.
Skepticism and metaskepticism seem to be two largely separate skills.
That is, the ability to debunk the claim “X is true” does not generalize to the ability to debunk the claim “X has been debunked”.
I have this problem myself.
I was taught the following foundation myth of my field: in the beginning, psychiatry was a confused amalgam of Freud and Jung and Adler and anyone else who could afford an armchair to speculate in. People would say things like that neurosis was caused by wanting to have sex with your mother, or by secretly wanting a penis, or goodness only knows what else.
Then someone had the bright idea that beliefs ought to be based on evidence! Study after study proved the psychoanalysts’ bizarre castles were built on air, and the Freudians were banished to the outer darkness. Their niche was filled by newer scientific psychotherapies with a robust evidence base, such as cognitive behavioral therapy and [mumble]. And thus was the empire forged.
Now normally when I hear something this convenient, I might be tempted to make sure that there were actual studies this was based on. In this case, I dropped the ball. The Heroic Foundation Myth isn’t a claim, I must have told myself. It’s a debunking. To be skeptical of the work of fellow debunkers would be a violation of professional courtesy!
The AJP article above is interesting because as far as I know it’s the largest study ever to compare Freudian and cognitive-behavioral therapies. It examined both psychodynamic therapy (a streamlined, shorter-term version of Freudian psychoanalysis) and cognitive behavioral therapy on 341 depressed patients. It found – using a statistic called noninferiority which I don’t entirely understand – that CBT was no better than psychoanalysis. In fact, although the study wasn’t designed to demonstrate this, just by eyeballing it looks like psychoanalysis did nonsignificantly better. The journal’s editorial does a good job putting the result in context.
Suppose we accept the conclusion in this and many other articles that psychodynamic therapy is equivalent to cognitive-behavioral therapy. Do we have to accept that Freud was right after all?
Well, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. The other possible conclusion is that cognitive-behavioral therapy doesn’t really work either.
Sinity
1yr ago
I have similar issues, but I don't think it's really internet addiction. It's more like indecisiveness. When trying to decide what should I do, I have a zillion options. I try to figure out the best, which is impossible. I know I should just pick something with positive value, but...
I'm thinking of outsourcing some decision-making to software. Maybe it's possible to build a habit of just doing what it outputs. Something like taskwarrior (or simply taskwarrior) + ordering importance of the tasks via Gwern's Resorter. Or picking e.g. book to read from a list randomly.
The goal is to fundamentally reconfigure your desires and dispositions so they're more naturally aligned with your actual goals.
if an app makes you spend time in a different way, you'll probably 'reconfigure desires' too.
A key factor in understanding internet addiction is understanding the need to accept boredom. Before smartphones, people used to get bored way more often. Sometimes you'd just have to sit there with literally nothing to do, not even anything to think - you won't always want to read a book, or entertain yourself with your own thoughts.
It doesn't help IMO. Experiencing boredom will make you resent the decision to do it to yourself, which leads to relapse. I don't really agree that scrolling Reddit is that entertaining too. Something like watching a good anime is better. The problem is picking which one...
Unlike hard drugs, total abstinence is neither possible nor desirable.
I disagree about it being desirable; hard drugs aren't a coherent category. Total abstinence from opioids if one isn't in pain makes sense; stimulants are useful though.
Sinity
1yr ago
I'm not sure what to do with this donation bucket. I don't want to just pay for developers because that runs the risk of pissing off existing developers (no, not like they're going to be posting angrily, they just might not do as much work.) It honestly depends on what the bucket looks like, which I won't know until I start one.
Maybe bounties on specific issues?
edit2: The markdown parser doubles newlines in the three-backtick code span.
Also lists are possibly broken (plus there's too much spacing between items)
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test
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second
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second level
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sth sth
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Sinity
1yr ago
They do have a tendency to overstate the severity and applicability of issues due to the benefits of publicity in that community.
Not sure if they overstate the severity of issues; If the NSA has been hacking everything, how has nobody seen them coming?
They were playing chess & you were playing checkers;
Not directly applicable here*, but cybersecurity in general is... there's no cybersecurity, really. Intel ME.
* but maybe for Gab / Truth and such?
Sinity
1yr ago
I only ever got banned from /r/sneerclub (for pointlessly arguing with them, and they even warned beforehand TBF), /r/drama for... drama? (I never commented there) and one other subreddit for reasons unrelated to CW.
Really, it doesn't seem to be as simple as posting something anti-progressive. Maybe it's a risk, but fairly low one.
Sinity
1yr ago
An alternative way to frame this is that spreading infohazards is good for people near the bottom of society but bad for those near the top, since higher societal instability is like heating up a bubbling cauldron of soup - the increased volatility makes it more likely that ingredients at the bottom will bubble up to the top.
Watch "Mr. Robot" TV show. a) it's great; b) shows things going the other way around than you expect, so you might notice sth you haven't considered.
Sinity
1yr ago
Distributed system is terrible from energy security perspective? Really?
As for amount of energy, there's enough investment that at worst there would be some years with lower supply. Maybe shortages during one or two months of winter. That's not exactly apocalyptic.
Sinity
1yr ago
Suppose we naively equalize this power, or just adapt current political institutions to it, such that in a few generations a plebeian can secure resources to start his own copyclan and bite off some share of the light cone. What would they make of it? Would they not devolve into puddles of high-maintenance hedonium? Or, worse, would they not spill into ugly rat races over artificially scarce artifacts to secure positional goods, invent increasingly absurd sports, flaunt their cognitive limitations, vote for some even more buffoonish Trumps, and generally mode-collapse into God-monkeys replaying behavioral loops from Savannah? Worst of all, would they not succumb to Moloch in His basest form, the Blight from Sandberg's own worldbuilding exercise, like Scott warned in his meditation?
Yeah, but that doesn't preclude giving them, say, equivalent of Earth's worth of resources. It doesn't necessitate murdering them by restricting anti-aging or mind uploading tech.
If a half-ape like me can think about eventual cool and useful things to do on an astronomical scale, to scale my agency up, they ought to be able to feel it already.
I don't expect there to be that much interesting stuff to do in Reality. Space ~undifferentiated at scale. Agency = compute.
I'm less of an elitist than you, and you're far from the worst offender, but frankly it's very hard for me to imagine that, if I were to make the decision that people upstream of of Altman or Hassabis will soon be positioned to make, I'd have the heart to play Prometheus. I would, however, try to spread the prerequisites of high agency. I'd be enticing baseline humans to partake of Ambrosia, the Fruit of Knowledge and the water of Mnemosyne before giving them Fire.
What would that involve?
Conveniently, utilitarians tell us that human lives, happiness points and QALYs are fungible, so it makes little difference on the cosmic scale if you uplift the current 8 billion half-apes, or let them expire (but ethically, e.g. doubling down on addictive entertainment production, SusTainaBility propaganda, birth control and child substitutes and industrializing this novel Canadian practice of recommending euthanasia to unhappy poor people), and generate a more aligned population from the small chosen seed.
I think most would agree that killing someone, to swap them for someone new, is not good.
Maybe it's copium, but I really don't believe that it's likely. It's a coherent view, and it does make sense from purely selfish perspective, sorta - but moral intuitions would scream. I mean, really? (not literal) post-scarcity achieved, now let's go kill everyone except close family and such? Kill actual living 10B humans, replace with new instances, personally designed?
All of that motivated by just wanting to grab, say, 10% more resources (otherwise allocated equally between existing humans)?
Anyway. From Perfect Imperfection:
- Yes. - She took a breath. - Take advantage of it. These are the privileges of your position. The ease of escaping into bliss, into places of absolute peace. Reverse the way you think: it's not you who moves in the world, it's the world that moves in front of you, like a perforated tape, and you choose on which part to latch the reader of your soul.
- Stahs [standard homo sapiens]. - He patted the horse on the neck. - I am a stahs. An aristocrat. Is that how I should think?
- Exactly. What, you don't like the word? Aristocracy is necessary.
- You are attempting to freeze culture in an artificial state.
- To freeze man. Humanity.
- It all amounts to the same thing.
- Does this outrage you? Why does it?
- I don't know. It seems to me some kind of... calculating, ruthless. Social engineering. It has a bad connotation.
- Didn't they tell you, every Progress inevitably gravitates towards UI.
- They said. Actually... you told me.
- Ah. - She raised her eyes to the starless sky. - Me. Well, yes. So you know - if it wasn't for Civilization, you would have found here after the resurrection only phoebes [posthumans] and inclusions; there would be no more stahs. Well, maybe a few zoological specimens.
- But did you have to go straight into all these pseudo-feudal rituals?
- There wasn't much choice. In an inf economy, in an economy of arbitrary distribution of infinitesimals, feudalism remains a stable system. Democracy - not. Is it democracy that you feel sorry for?
(...)
It appeared that she had gone all the way: the sun setting over the ocean, the golden beach, the white stones of the boardwalk, the warm wind above shaking the plumes of palm trees.
The beach was not yet empty, dozens of tanned nude people were walking along the wave boundary or playing volleyball. A girl with a dog stopped at the steps leading to the boardwalk and gawked at Adam and Angelica - she probably noticed their condensation. Zamoyski winked at her. She whistled at the dog and they ran on, child and animal. (...)
They ordered milkshakes. From the waitress's demeanor, her naked nervousness, her quick, stealthy glances, her artificial precision of speech, Adam inferred that she recognized the stahs in them.
When she left, he looked around the boardwalk and the beach. He looked for signs of tension and agitation in the behavior of the beachgoers - the recent war with the Deformants, the current one - with the Suzeren, these massacres of people from the ripped apart Ports... But nothing. A postcard resort.
How much of the information about these meta-physical clashes ever leaks into the cultural soil of HS Civilization, to the very bottom? Gnosis doesn't censor it, after all; it's all floating around in Plateau. But apparently the enstahs don't care much.
But you have to admit: they live luxuriously - in the luxuries of the 21st century.
- How many of them do you think have citizenship of Civilization?
- Probably none. - Angelika shrugged her shoulders.
- Do you remember what you told me then, in the clearing, under the moon? About the rules of Civilization and feudalism?
- Aha.
- "Because to me it looks", he waved his hand, "like the twenty-first century, right down to the marrow of its democratic bones."
- Well. Ninety-nine percent most of the time live as you lived in the twenty-first, after all, this is what our Civilization is based on, we must have a strong cultural foundation, a certainty of normality. But above these ninety-nine percent are the stahs, there is the whole hierarchy of Civilization, the Lodges and the Emperor and the Gnosis and the prohibition laws. Well, then, this political structure that makes the twenty-first century possible - now it was Angelika who embraced the landscape with a broad gesture - this structure is feudal in its essence.
- You can't live in democracy and feudalism at the same time. It is an absurdity of sorts. They quarrel with each other in every detail, in language even.
- Really? After all, in your time feudalism has already begun to overtake democracy. Don't make such a face. You knew. The greater the power of the intellect - and therefore of money - the lesser the power of the majority.
- You were well indoctrinated by the Jesuits. And the facts - what are they? He looked at the beachgoers.
- Stupid sheep herded by enlightened shepherds from the heights of the Curve. How nicely they play! How happy they are! How wonderfully tanned! How nicely fattened! We'll step in before bedtime, stroke their heads, they'll lick our legs, make us feel better - and let them continue to play carelessly.
- Isn't this what the paradise of democracy looked like in your day?
- Democracy. Repeat the word. And those here? They don't have the right to vote, they're not citizens, they don't -.
- But they don't want to be citizens! As stahs they would be restricted by Tradition. And yes - they are absolutely free. Civilization does not constrain them. They can be whatever they wish. Do whatever they desire. Do nothing if they desire it. Inf fulfills their dreams, inf gives them security.
- And what do they do? They lie on the beaches.
- And what did they do in your day? They drank through their allowances in neighborhood parks. - She laughed. - Fren is the same, only the laziness is more luxurious.
- But why is citizenship something that is bought? Even if they wanted to, they couldn't afford it.
- And how do you distinguish such a decision from hundreds of other temporary whims, fulfilled on a word? How do you make them feel that citizenship and politics are more than just another inf game?
- In such a culture they grew up, what do you expect from them?
- But nothing! This is just a man's natural state!
- After all, you can see it, she resumed more quietly. - Just look at them. Progress itself is undemocratic. Take a look at the Curve: up over here, down there. The universe is undemocratic. There is no such livable universe at all that doesn't enforce a Perfect Form, doesn't impose a hierarchy. Democracy goes against the laws of physics. And subconsciously they know it, they all know it.
Sinity
1yr ago
I don't know, is it inconceivable that UBI+light wireheading through superstimuli could keep the vast majority of people sufficiently placid to prevent widespread upheaval until the problem solves itself through birthrate collapse? This would have the same effect as a genocide of the poor, but not involve a lot of violence or even generally offense to revealed ethical preference.
And what would be the appeal? Disregarding morality entirely, I think I'd prefer ~postscarcity + large population to small population.
Sinity
1yr ago
Huh, 20 years ago? I thought it'd be something new, looking at the title: "The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Polish".
Also "By: authors", lol.
Everyone here is white. They are not ostentatiously white the way, say, Swedes are;
Most obviously, there aren’t many Africans, Arabs, or Asians. The rest of Europe seems a wonderfully Technicolor place these days—the metro in Paris, Rome, and London could almost be mistaken for the subway in New York. Heterogeneity is a tonic; it adds the energy of unexpected combinations—the woman in chador chatting with the blonde woman in jogging gear on the tube. Ah, cosmopolitanism! But alas, Poland is merely Polish, an experiment in ethnic deprivation; the unbearable whiteness of being.
Speaking of cosmopolitanism—Stalin’s favorite euphemism for Jewishness—there aren’t many Jews here, either. There used to be three million, but the Nazis took care of that. Forty percent of Warsaw was Jewish; the deficit now seems overpowering, they fill the empty spaces in the streets. And not just the Jews: Thousands upon thousands of Polish Catholics were killed at Auschwitz, thousands more were worked to death in Siberia; the officer class of the Polish army was slaughtered by the Nazis and the Soviets. Poland was the charnel house of the 20th century.
This doesn't even seem accusatory at least until this point. "Authors" seem to just really, really fetishize 'diversity'.
The economy stopped growing, as market economies will sometimes do. Unemployment stands at more than 18 percent. In the parliamentary election of 2000, the center did not hold. The former Communists, who had gained power posing as social democrats, remained in control, but the center-right opposition—largely composed of Solidarity remnants—collapsed. Two rather unique populist parties suddenly materialized as significant forces. One was the League of Polish Families, a party of Catholic nationalist extremists (which received 9 percent of the vote); the other was called Self-Defense, a frightening mixture of nationalism and socialism led by a bully named Andrzej Lepper (it received 10 percent, but its strength has nearly doubled in recent public opinion polls). By contrast, Freedom Union—the party of the former Solidarity intellectuals—received only 3 percent and has disappeared from the Polish parliament, the Sejm.
And so, the Polish jitters. Pessimists abound in Warsaw and around the country. There is a war between the government and the still-strict central bank over monetary policy. Lepper is making news every day, usually involving scuffles with the police (last Thursday, he tried to stop imported grain from entering Poland by rail) or with his fellow parliamentarians (he was removed from the hall after a scuffle last Friday). It is likely that the former Communists, led now by prime minister Leszek Miller, will attempt to move left, sloppily, in an attempt to ease the pain, outflank the populists, and keep their apparatchiks prosperous.
“Poland is becoming more and more like Latin America,” says Jaroslaw Kaczynski , leader of the Law and Justice party, a reformist center-right political remnant of Solidarity. “People succeed here not because they’re talented, but because they know the right people. There is a Polish saying: Thousands gain, millions lose. This is an oversimplification, but we do pay an enormous corruption tax, and no one seems interested in reform. So we have an economic crisis that threatens to become a political crisis—my fear is that unless the economy improves, the populist parties will become very strong.”
And now he rules, thanks to blatant populism.
Sinity
1yr ago
(Online) people bringing it up since the war started are shunned. Before, it was frequently brought up.
Sinity
1yr ago
a significant component their national myth is of Poles as the bulwark, standing strong against the tide (Polish spearmen held back the Golden Horde, Polish Hussars broke the siege of Vienna, and so on).
Sometimes to a cringe-inducing degree. See Christ of Europe
Sinity
1yr ago
If advertisers are willing to pay so much, maybe Elon can just ignore their demands to control what kind of content is allowed on the platform?
Sinity
1yr ago
I think there's a nontrivial chance (say, 15%?) that Twitter ends up banned from various app stores like other 'free speech' twitter clones have. Lets say within one year.
It'd be hilarious if it happened, and then Musk invested serious money into some alt-appstore for Android. And maybe somehow broke iPhones to allow alternate app stores there too. Tho EU is already solving that particular problem apparently.
Are you sure death (ceasing to exist) is swift-enough following a bullet in the brain? Frankly, I'd feel more comfortable speeding up to 200km/h and hitting a tree.
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