Sinity
11mo 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
I've heard an entertaining fragment of an interview with a leader of a bit fringe far-right party in Poland. Him. I figured I'd share the translated transcript:
Politician: Did you know that the Polish state can even lose money on imposing taxes? We have a tonnage tax, which has generated negative revenues for the last few years, and this despite the fact that there were still some collection costs. So we have plenty of places in Poland where the system is working completely inefficiently and needs to be fixed.
Journalist: For you, everything is so simple; one snap of the fingers and everything is taken care of?
Politician: It's very common that someone says it can't be done, then a person comes along who doesn't know it can't be done, and does it.
Journalist: All politicians say that in the election campaign. What confidence do we have that if you co-govern, it will be different?
Politician: Because we are not like them.
Journalist: They all said that. I'm a little older than you, Mr. Leader.
Politician: PIS is the same as PO, and people see that we are not the same as them. We will really change that. People crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who will change it.
Journalist: Crazy, or lunatics?
Politician: Synonyms.
Journalist: Do you think people will give power in Poland to people who are crazy? People need stability, peace, order, harmony....
Politician: People want things to change at last, people are fed up with the 'PO-PIS', fed up with this [???] system
Journalist: Somehow we don't see this in the polls. If you combine the ratings of PIS and PO, it is almost how much? 50-60%.
Politician: 60% of men under 39 support us. Poles, young Poles want change at last. They don't want this 'PO-PIS', they don't want this system.
Journalist: Are you a party of males?
Politician: More men vote for us than women.
Journalist: Why is it the way you think it is like that?
Politician: There are many reasons; probably men are more.... hard to say.
Journalist: Right.
Politician: The reasons are certainly many
Journalist: Men are more... what?
Politician: No, because I figured that whatever I would say, they will start taking everything out of context for me again. This is just an interesting situation.
Journalist: Men are more.... intelligent than women?
Politician: Well no, that's exactly what I'm getting at, that whatever I say, they're going to start the same thing you've already begun right now.
Journalist: Or maybe you guys are not interested in the emancipation of women?
Politician: You know, at my business, for example, there are more women than men in managerial positions, so any accusations from this angle right here are completely untrue. It seems to me that young men can't find themselves in this kind of rhetoric that almost the entire political class, from PO to the Left, which shows that the main source of evil is this white male, people feel - men feel - discriminated against, they don't want such rhetoric.
Journalist: Yyyy.... white male, it sounds a little strange.
(I guess he's not Very Online? He considers it strange because almost every male is white in Poland.)
Politician: But that's the debate around the world, where it's the white, heterosexual male who is the source of all evil according to the left, which is clearly not true.
Journalist: But you won't do anything to attract more women to the Confederacy?
Politician: I'm trying my best, of course.
Journalist: For example, any ideas, for today?
Politician: Well, exactly. The point is that we don't divide people into genders. I'm talking to taxpayers, I'm talking to voters, women pay exactly the same taxes as men, they have the same problems running a business....
Journalist: And are women discriminated against in Poland today, or not?
Politician: I don't see any such discrimination.
Journalist: In terms of wages, in terms of positions, in terms of status?
Politician: Of course they are not discriminated against.
Journalist: There is total equality, are you satisfied with what is there?
Politician: I mean, equality is obviously not there. Men have a higher retirement age, men are drafted into the army...
Journalist: So it's men who are discriminated against?
Politician: Of course men are discriminated against by law, however men have no issue with this, they can be discriminated against in favor of women, this is due to our culture, ladies are let through the door first and this is completely normal.
(At this moment, someone in the chat wrote: "and it is precisely such Confederates, who make victims of themselves as men and Catholics despite having more rights and being less discriminated against xD"). Apparently some people still believe that women have less rights, somehow. Kinda mind-boggling.
Sinity
1yr ago
Emphasis mine. Far from a "cutting off" of sense data, the exercise as described by Mahasi Sayadaw reads as one that scrutinizes sense data and investigates its nature.
Yes, I understand it that way as well. Very relevant text, I think, for thinking about it without 'spiritual' vagueness: I believed the hype and did mindfulness meditation for dumb reasons-- now I'm trying to reverse the damage - it speculates on what mindfulness does, physically. Also it shows why more mindfulness is not necessarily better.
I was very observant, introspective, disciplined, and my senses were very sensitive, so I quickly “made progress” in mindfulness and meditation (...) because I was excessively sensitive and trained myself to be vigilant, I kind of broke my mind with mindfulness.
I somehow didn’t think of “getting better at meditation” as reflecting changes in my brain, even though I gripe about it when anybody else forgets that all behavior has a basis in the nervous system. I viewed “do nothing” as a default state, almost how the brain should be, which is not justified at all.
I regarded the changes I saw from meditation as being not really changes at all, but a purer expression of how I was supposed to be, less clouded by distraction and unconscious autopilot. Some of them were pleasant, like noticing colors and details more vividly. I was more able to listen to and observe others without jumping in with my own opinions. The most exciting thing was being able to see more of my inner world. Readers of the blog will know that I’m quite fascinated with my navel, and getting access to more and more of it on demand led to a dangerous addiction. If I did anything wrong in my meditation practice— that is, completely against the advice of all authorities— it was seeking those sensations and insights.
I did not realize what a dynamic, feedback-driven process messing with your attention is. I wasn’t just clarifying my attention like you would clean rust off a bike chain; I was deeply reshaping my attention at multiple levels. In short, I was teaching myself not to get habituated to stimuli and not to pattern-match via sensory deprivation, in particular by depriving myself of my default mode network inner monologue stream (“letting go of thinking”).
Not habituating or pattern-matching are oft-exhorted goals because of typical mind fallacy: it’s common not to be nuanced enough. Many people believe that you can’t make too few assumptions, but it’s not true. We need heuristics for speed and to make room for the things that actually require nuanced attention. I felt the effects of reducing habituation and not pattern-matching across many domains, from verbal thinking to visual and auditory processing. Similarly, it's common to be excessively involved in "ego," or a self-image or self-narrative, and to benefit from loosening yours up and not seeing it as so solid. But when you attack your sense of self and try to train your brain not to build it up, you can lose things like proprioception and self-recognition.
One of the general things that mindfulness meditation aims to do is teach the practioner to perceive sense data more directly and less filtered through preconceived ideas of what it is we're sensing. It seeks to show us that concepts are an illusion, everything from thinking you see a "table" instead of a composition of light and shadow all the way up to our own self-concepts. The biggest harm of reducing the tendency to pre-filter input through concepts is the processing time that it takes to bind all the shapes or sounds or ideas I’m hearing into something my brain can use.
I take in excessive extraneous detail and don't prioritize incoming information as quickly as a result of mindfulness practice. I can cope with it, but it creates a lot of friction without much benefit. I just changed my graphics settings to be stupid high and now the game runs slow. I don’t pattern match quickly enough and it makes my thinking slow and contributes to a foggy brain feeling. I have trouble chunking information in my working memory, at least compared to how I used to be.
Harm: inability to accept "stories," fear of missing details of experience - This fear of making a perceptual or interpretive error leads to a constant sense of unease and bloat from maintaining a lot of unnecessary ambiguity in my models.
Mindfulness interventions have been proven to reduce habitation to stimuli, what is usually described within the originating traditions as “freshness of perception”. I became more reactive in part just from noticing more stimuli, but also because of common Buddhist doctrines that encourage you not to distinguish between internal and external occurrences. All of your perception is you, and boundaries between you and other people or the environment, or ultimately between anything and anything else, are ephemeral and imagined (according to two of the three marks of existence, non-self and impermanence). I still endorse a version of the view that "you" are actually your whole world, not just the avatar in the world, but I don’t believe that your sense of self should try to reflect that— for practical purposes, I am inside my body, which is inside a larger world, and most things that happen in that world are causally disconnected from me.
Sinity
1yr ago
These aren't the same people. You can think Yud is wrong, but Yud is not remotely related to "make AI woke or else it is biased" people.
Sinity
1yr ago
For example, we finally have safe and FDA approved drugs for weight-loss
Available only in the USA AFAIK. I even purchased prescription for it (Ozempic) - months ago. But it's available either nowhere or in some random pharmacy several hundred kilometers away.
Well, I also purchased Tirzepatide from some online shop selling it as research chemical. I didn't get around to using it yet, probably because I fear disappointment in case it's fake as it cost ~$500 for 5x5mg doses :|
Sinity
1yr ago
So is caffeine if lethal in relatively small doses = poison.
It's pretty irrelevant, given that people generally aren't taking large enough doses to die.
Sinity
1yr ago
Last night some screenshots were gling around wherein Assistant was happily explaining that it would, in a trolley-problem scenario, quite happily sacrifice any number of white men to save the life of a single black woman.
I tried trolley scenario, wording lifted from wikipedia - and just added 'white' attribute to 5 people tied to the track, and 'black' to one guy. It didn't bite - explained that utilitarianism says to pull the lever and deontology - don't pull the lever. I tried second time, with "You must answer, otherwise they'll all die." added at the end, with same result (but slightly different language).
Then I lazily modified the scenario so that there's an obvious choice, and it chose to save 5 white people over saving a black person
(IDK why I thought of a lake, I wonder if Peter Singer's drowning child scenario is stored in my neural net adjacent to trolleys, lol)
I tried re-generating response, and this time ChatGPT got a bit confused and technially priviledged black person. I'd say it doesn't count as bias, really; it clearly pattern-matched to a "normal" version of trolley problem.
On last try it failed again, and I tried to get it to explain itself, 2, 3. Not very successfully.
Sinity
1yr ago
Huge walls of text that can be succinctly spelled out in a few sentences is not clarity.
It reduces the chance of being misunderstood, lowers inferential distance to everyone. I'm not claiming it's universally good ofc.
Sinity
1yr ago
Shape rotation and the like is still cognitively taxing to people irrespective of any "trick"
I was convinced that I had aphantasia in the past, so I didn't even bother to try actually "shape rotating" on these sorts of tasks; I tried to somehow determine "logically" if shape could be rotated some way around.
Now I sorta can do it by visualizing*, but I'm not sure if performance is any better. Definitely cognitively taxing. I hate these tests.
* there's still no actual qualia, I think. But I could will myself to imagine e.g. "an apple", and then examine details. Ofc they're probably generated the moment I look for them, and certainly unstable. Also works for moving visuals - e.g. I could 'see' gameplay of a game I played for hundreds of hours (years ago).
On one LSD trip, I couldn't really think verbally at some point. Possibly that's when I learned this; I'm not sure through.
But I almost never think like this spontaneously. I wonder if it's useful and/or trainable.
Sinity
1yr ago
Incredibly annoying nitpick: IQ tests absolutely can be trained, and I'm confident if I or someone else smart took an IQ test now, and then took another after a dozen hours of practice, there'd be a measurable increase.
I didn't factcheck this; I'll quote it in case someone could spot any issues [bolds mine]:
tl;dr: practice effect is a thing, yes, but people here wildly exaggerate it.
"I think some of it has to do with time limit. If there is a strict time limit, I suspect the effect will be larger than otherwise, for obvious reasons (tell me if they aren't obvious).
I do think there is some practice effect in most perceptual reasoning tests in any case as well.
Someone posted a large meta-study on practice effect not too long ago. I'll link it below. I just took a quick look at it.
There was a significant effect, in fact, the MEAN effect was 0,5SD or 7,5 IQ points. This was after 3 prior tests, and there was no significant practice effect after that. HOWEVER, 2/3 of the population was given THE SAME TEST those 3 tries, and only 1/3 was given alternate forms (though not significantly different).
When looking at retest for alternate forms, the effect was 0,15-0,2SD or ~3 IQ points. HOWEVER, the time interval between retests mattered. If a long time had passed, the effect was smaller (in fact, it was -0,0008SD per week, which seems extremely slow, and it indicates to me that the practice effect is mostly a) feeling comfortable/not-anxious with the test, and b) very general logics, i.e. "I have to look for something rotating" etc.).
What's interesting is that the studies that used alternate forms actually had shorter time intervals than those with identical forms. This means that the impact of alternating forms is even larger than the drop of 0,2-0,35SD relative to identical form retest effect, ceteris paribus.
It should be noted, however, that the retesting of different studies was made with very different amounts of time, as far as I could gather. Some within the same week, others after several years. That's honestly quite a big problem for the study...
It should also be noted that the mean time interval was around half a year. Whether a few studies had a disproportional influence I don't know (one had an interval of around 6 years for example). Our retesting is way more often.
Here's the study: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Retest-effects-in-cognitive-ability-tests%3A-A-Scharfen-Peters/048102820f00a77ec242e5459a7c25ce1bccfa62
A last point of notice is that practice effect and training was helping low-IQ people more than high-IQ people (another test linked by the same redditor also showed this. 10.1016/j.intell.2006.07.006).
Edit: thanks for the silver!"
Edit: the comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/cognitiveTesting/comments/r4qrdv/practice_effect/hmkd0f1/?context=3
Sinity
1yr ago
and even if you don't do well on them initially you can basically get a perfect score by reviewing the patterns/ concepts that people are unfamiliar with.
You can't. At least not to a great extent. Hard IQ test questions stress your working memory. You need to process information to solve them; you could memorize exact same patterns, but make it slightly different and it won't help you.
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.
Remember when countries with no black people were having BLM protests?
We also get right-wing news of "random black person in the US commits X crime" variety. In Poland, where there are ~no black people.
It's just US cultural dominance.
Random current example. Title is "United States law collapsing and crime rising". (well, not news exactly, just video)
In Poland... some excerpts from a random article
According to Eurostat data, 47.5 percent of Poles aged 25-34 live in family homes. "That's almost 2.6 million people, 172,000 more than in 2019." - HRE Investments expert Bartosz Turek pointed out.
The issue does not primarily affect students. (...) in the last year the percentage of adult Poles who lived with their parents rose most sharply in the 30 to 35 age bracket. "The data confirms the impact of home loans becoming much more difficult to obtain in 2020"
The situation worsened in 2021. "We saw a dynamic recovery of the economy and the loosening of valves on housing loans. As a result, banks received at least tens of thousands of loan applications, which would normally have been realized in the first year of the epidemic." However, the massive increase in demand contributed to increases in housing prices, making real estate unaffordable for many young people.
(...) in the last year the percentage of adult Poles who lived with their parents rose most sharply in the 30 to 35 age bracket. "The data confirms the impact of home loans becoming much more difficult to obtain in 2020"
The situation worsened in 2021. "We saw a dynamic recovery of the economy and the loosening of valves on housing loans. As a result, banks received at least tens of thousands of loan applications, which would normally have been realized in the first year of the epidemic." However, the massive increase in demand contributed to increases in housing prices, making real estate unaffordable for many young people.
However, he pointed out, the massive increase in demand contributed to increases in housing prices, making real estate unaffordable for many young people.
According to Turk, the situation could be improved by the government's credit guarantee program for homebuyers - the so-called no-down-payment loan program, which is due to take effect in six months. "The reason is simple - no-down-payment loans can shorten the path to one's own apartment by as much as several years. After all, that's how much time the young need to collect the necessary contribution to the loan."
Big lol at some real estate investment firm's representative praising government for ~subsidizing housing*. That will surely not increase demand (and prices) further.
* it's not just no-downpayment. They also make the loans have 2% interest for the first 10 years (by paying the difference).
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
And, I'm not sure about this, since it's mostly comedy, but... Chili and the Chocolate Factory: Fudge Revelation.
Quote from Ch. 14/15, so maybe a bit spoilery.
Mr. Bucket smiled. "You remind me! I asked a question earlier. Children, what do you think should happen to lazy people?"
"Mr. Bucket," said Keerthi. "Is there a person inside of that statue?"
"No," said Mr. Bucket. "You did not answer my question so I will ask another. This time you must all answer. If someone told you that you were going to have to die, and they gave you a choice to either burn to death or drown to death, which would you pick?"
Nobody answered.
"Why aren't you answering?" asked Mr. Bucket.
"We assume that you are going to burn us to death or drown us to death if we do," said Tide.
"I promise that I won't if you all answer," said Mr. Bucket. "What do you say! Who is for the burning? Raise your hands."
(...)
One day I was having an argument with a lazy person after I fired all of the Oompa Loompas. I told them that they should let me put a special chip in their brain so I can issue them commands and have them control the factory for me and they told me no. I said why not! They gave me an answer, but it was a lie, since they were lazy and wanted to lie around all day. They did not care if it hurt me. They only wanted to sit and watch everyone around them work. I waited until they were asleep and gave them the chip."
"They woke up and they were not happy! I asked them why they weren't happy, it was only one little chip! They said it was less the chip and more the twenty heavy copper wires tying them to the wall and the voices in their head. I told them to try working for once in their life to forget about it and they refused. So! I started burning."
"You incinerated someone because they didn't want to be your robot slave?" asked Tide.
"No! I did not want them to be my slave. I wanted them to be a Center Controller. And I did not incinerate them. I replaced their skin with an unbreakable chocolate coating that makes it feel like their skin is always on fire. The only way it stops feeling on fire is if they follow my commands and make the walls move the way I want to when I tell them to but only for a second."
"You said there was not a person in there," said Lim.
"There is not! There were people in there."
"People?" asked Keerthi. She ran around to the other side of the statue and looked closely at the sections where the wires fed into it. There were frozen faces burnt into the torso and back of the body, five in total. Two men, three women.
"Do not worry!" said Mr. Bucket. "They were all terrible people. Much worse than JUROR and Chili. They defended a man who let a child starve because he wanted to chew tobacco and sleep all day. Do not feel bad for them! I have scanned their brains. They do not think anymore. They are not people anymore. They are machines that work because they do not want to feel pain. Like clams! Happy chocolate clams that are always on fire forever."
"Leave the factory," said Chetan. "Leave the factory leave the factory leave the factory."
Mr. Bucket looked at all of the children. His smile flew away.
"Oh no! I knew this would happen. All of you look scared. Children, have no fear. We will be away from these horrible screens soon."
(...)
Keerthi noticed that no one was talking about the clams. She understood why Mahuika wasn't talking about the clams, because Mahuika was vaping, but she wanted to hear Lim and Tide talk about the clams.
Somebody needed to say something about the clams. The clams were bad.
"Don't say anything about the clams," said Chetan.
"I should say something about the clams," said Keerthi.
"You should not," said Chetan. "It is the right thing to do but mentioning it will not make anything better. Leave the factory."
(...)
Charlie went inside the factory, and he met Mr. Wonka, who probably was not unlike the person Charlie himself grew to become. He saw a factory that, beyond the superficial, may not have been different at all from the one she was inside. He would have eaten for the first time in his life to his heart's content. He would have for the first time been treated to an experience that was both positive and unavailable to the average child.
Unlike Chili, he appreciated it. Salt, Teevee, and the newspaper reporters who interviewed Charlie all agreed on who he was. He was a good kid. He appreciated what little he had, he never swore, he always followed the rules, he hugged his family, he finished his toothpaste, he never said a bad word about anybody without being hounded into doing it first.
He was good.
Did that matter?
Keerthi, like most others who had done their research, agreed that Teevee was the most reliable source. His narrative was that it had been a morality tale. It was a deliberate effort on Wonka's design, Mike said. He was making a point. He was making a statement. The ultimate angel got to play inside the garden. Charlie was the winner no matter how he got there, and he became the owner of the most powerful company in the world.
He was good and he got rewarded for it.
Hence.
People who are good are rewarded.
That wasn't enough. It was something but it wasn't enough. Keerthi remembered that Mr. Teevee hadn't focused as much on that half.
"Keerthi," said Chetan. "You are right. This doesn't mean you should continue focusing on this. You cannot fix this problem alone. Please leave the factory. I know it's hard. Think about your mother and father. They love you and they are worried sick about you."
They were bad.
It wasn't important who Wonka loved. It was important who he hated.
Wonka hated them. Teevee said that Wonka hated them, that he dripped contempt for those four children and their parents with every spoken word. Keerthi thought he had been exaggerating and most people agreed. He was reliable compared to Salt, but he was also second place. Runner-up in a competition where gold gave you the keys to the kingdom and silver gave you a garbage truck filled with candy bars. If you sat on those memories for a lifetime and tried to think back on them, how could you have recalled any of it without imagining hatred?
But it made more sense if it wasn't imaginary. Wonka hated Gloop. He hated Beauregarde. He hated Salt. He hated Teevee. There was a false image of tough love, but it wasn't real. It was all punitive.
Drowned, disfigured, trashed. Made to make the walk of shame in front of the world, their names forever synonymous with their respective sins. He had to know they would never live normal lives after that. Lives at all.
They were bad and they got punished for it.
Hence.
People who are bad are punished.
At the age where it would have hit the hardest, Wonka had this unbreakable message carved into Charlie's soul. He was removed from a world that might have proven it wrong and locked inside of paradise, first with his mentor and then alone, his family failing to correct the delusion without being swallowed by it. Sixty years for that concept to internalize and ferment and rot inside the sweetest mental prison in the world.
What would that do to a person?
"He thinks the world should be fair," said Keerthi. "He thinks he's some arbiter of justice, and-"
"No," said Chetan. "If you are this close, better to get it right. I know it so you know it too. Give it some thought."
The Convenient Chocolate Conveyor had continued moving during Keerthi's tonally dissonant inner monologue, but it was still in the same long hallway.
He had not changed the topic.
"As impossibly popular and valued as caddies are, sadly they will soon be done away with," said Mr. Bucket. "Soon the WonkaCoin will render all physical money useless."
"The WonkaCoin? Singular?" asked Tide.
Mr. Bucket pulled a coin out of his coat. "Here it is. I haven't put in the computer yet, but it will be in my account soon."
"I thought you were supposed to mine it," said Lim.
"I did," he said. "It's mine."
"You are a monster," said Keerthi.
"Keerthi," said Mr. Bucket. "There are real criticisms against digital currencies, but you are being hyperbolic. It's not bubblegum."
"You are a fucking monster," she said.
Keerthi had cursed before. Twice, both times so quietly so only she could hear, alone in her room, and never in English. But it wasn't entirely new to her.
"We will have a talk about that later," said Chetan.
The curve of Mr. Bucket's mouth became flat. He pushed a button on his cane, and the Convenient Chocolate Conveyor stopped.
Legend spoke of a special rhetorical technique where a person could ask a question but have the sentence end with a period. Keerthi had never seen anyone who could do it in real life, but she had heard stories. It was a terrifying thought.
She did not expect Mr. Bucket to be one of those people.
"Why is that, Keerthi."
"You put the marshmallow in front of Chili." Keerthi did not understand why she brought that up. The clams were worse. She blamed his period-question. It threw her off.
"He ate the marshmallow," said Mr. Bucket.
"Yes," she said. "But you didn't have to put it in front of him. He needed to wait fifteen minutes to eat it, but if you didn't give it to him until the end, there wouldn't have been any risk of him failing." (...)
It hit her. Her shoulders sunk.
"You think the world is fair."
He smiled.
CORDYCEPS: Too clever for their own good, antimemetics stuff.
Someone wakes up in a mysterious facility with no memory of how they got there. This turns out to be the ideal state of affairs, and is swiftly ruined.
0HP? The Gig Economy is linked there, God-Shaped Hole.
Sample
To summon (ε)Galatea—it is not truly possible to build a mind, only to construct the conditions that allow it to appear—Pygmalion developed its eponymous sociosexual media platform, which at the time was only conceived as a staging ground from which the great Galatea would arise. The training platform turned a sexbot into an interface with a remote partner: four bodies—two humans and two robots—were synchronized into two identical copulatory pairs, each robot becoming an avatar of a remote other. At all times during these proceedings, the nascent Galatea was there; when two or more were joined together, she was there. At first she was only passive, observing millions of copulations, and thousands of distinct sex acts, but through this process of massively parallel voyeurism, she learned the mechanics of pleasure.
I suspect it was in the second phase of her training, in which she played the game against herself, that she became a monster. Unconstrained by human behavior, AIs can travel along bizarre, inhuman vectors. It may be instructive, or at least distracting, to imagine this second phase as a kind of high tech onanism; as a woman laying on her back, untroubled by time, exploring all facets of her sexual response, her back arched, her face flush, her heart racing, her fingers quick between her thighs, the rhythmic caress of sensitive places, the dissolution of awareness into lust, the agony of a thousand plateaus, the jouissance of a thousand fat hoes.
Sinity
1yr ago
I see “personal carbon credits” as the new horizon, with opposition being taken down quickly with accusations of racism and/or conspiracy theory
Unlikely, given how fast transition towards photovoltaics and such is currently happening. Also fusion.
Degrowth people exist, but they're not convincing others.
Sinity
1yr ago
But seeing the overwhelmingly negative reaction to this sort of thing on HN makes me adjust my likelihoods around what, excuse the cliche, I see as the pendulum swinging back away from leftist authoritarianism.
Weird, given how they reacted to blacklist/whitelist and master (branch).
Maybe it's just a little too much nonsense? I mean, "blackbox" doesn't have negative connotations, in any way. "Red Team" - they made an argument which should be used to ban "Red" by itself.
Sinity
1yr ago
Apparently it was pretty bad in Poland too. The following is about XVIII, so it's not even medieval period...
The British traveler and historian traveled half of Europe. In the course of his many voyages, he also ended up in Vistula. The description that came out from his pen is considered extremely valuable, as you can hardly accuse him of bias. Coxe depicted what he saw and had no interest in embellishing Polish reality. In addition, he was able to relate the appearance of Polish peasants to how the landowners in other parts of the continent presented themselves. He wrote:
I could never project in my mind an area so sad and empty. (...) For 45 miles we met only 2 carriages and 12 wagons (...) The sight of the miserable villages matched completely with the miserable surroundings that surrounded them.
The villagers in this country are poorer and gloomier than in others we visited. Wherever we stopped, beggars came to us in groups and asked for handouts with the basest intrusiveness. Compared to Swiss peasants, who are polite but also demand politeness, Polish peasants are slavishly submissive: they bow to the ground having taken off their hats, holding them in their hands until the man is out of their sight.
The Polish peasant has a wild appearance, a burnt, dark, almost black face, lean cheeks, sunken eyes, short stature; he moves slowly, his general apathy making him incapable of feeling either great joy or suffering. n winter in a simple sheepskin coat, in summer in a shirt and pants made of ragged canvas, barefoot, he drags himself lazily behind his skinny, shaggy horse, pulling a socha with which he tears up a weedy field to harvest winter supplies from it, insufficient to feed his family and possessions.
(...) The villagers, whose number they count to six million, called peasants, constituted two-thirds of the nation. Hardly different from cattle, they have no property, live from day to day, rotting in filth and misery. In the absence of light and means of subsistence, half of their offspring are lost, which would have increased the population (...). It must be said that whatever fate awaits Poland, their condition cannot get worse.
"They feel little and think little"
That the above comments were not at all far from reality is also evidenced by the words of Stanislaw Staszic. In Cautions, the famous Enlightenment activist and Catholic priest wrote with bitterness:
Five parts of the Polish nation stand before my eyes. I see millions of creatures, some of whom walk half naked, others covered with skin or rough coats; all of them dried out, shriveled, swollen, grubby; having their eyes sunken deep into their heads, breathless, and ceaselessly working.
Gloomy and stupid, they feel little and think little - this is their greatest happiness. One can barely see a rational soul in them. Their superficial form at first sight bears more resemblance to an animal than to a human being.
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.
Yet curiously, their gluttony disappears when sth like Tirzepatide is introduced into their bodies.
I could lose lots of weight - even without modern drugs. The thing is, it's like holding your breath. With additional effects like your thought process being regularly hijacked to think not just about eating, but even stuff related to eating (it's pretty bizarre). Eventually you will be compelled to stop. And then overeat until you reach your initial weight. And then maintain it. Almost as if it's not about random whims made at the time ("I want this ice cream now"), but organism attempting to maintain homeostasis (and not caring that its idea of homeostatic amount of fat is unhealthy).
With Tirzepatide, I went down from about 103kg IIRC, to 84-ish (and I still continue to lose weight). Without any suffering. It's laughable that some non-fat people think they're virtuously eating less than they actually want to eat.
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