Sinity
1yr ago
So, in Polish internet, there's currently some noise about mobilization. One user got summoned for the month-long military exercises, which supposedly ends with being forced to take an oath (which seems like a weird concept), and then being moved into 'active reserve'. Which means you can potentially get summoned for such exercises for 90 days per year.
A (translated) summary/context from /r/Polska:
1/ On the first of December, on the Wykop.pl, one user made an submission, saying that he had received a summons to undergo 33 days of training from the WCR (military recruitment center) in Sieradz. He had not done any military service before.
The post was quickly upvoted onto the frontpage and received nearly 7000 upvotes and 2000 comments.
2/ Gradually, from the Wykop portal, the topic began to make its way into our subreddit. One of the first extensive posts analyzing the situation was I got a summons to the army - what's next? by /u/emotional_penalty, which got almost 1500 upvotes and over 1000 comments.
3/ Questions and discussions began to emerge en masse both on Wykop and here to determine the grounds for such an appointment. The same user posted a local radio station's interview with a WCR Sieradz employee, who said that such summons are correct, and failure to appear comes with severe consequences.
4/ The topic began to grow more and more. Someone threw around the idea that the cause of the problem is the amendment to the Law on Universal Defense Obligation passed in the parliament this year, which imposes the possibility of taking a civilian with an assigned category of military fitness for military exercises.
5/ Upon reaching the parliamentary vote, it turns out that all deputies of all parties voted in favor of the law, except for half of the Confederation, who abstained.
Direct link to the results of that vote. Voted: 455, For: 450, Against: 0, Abstained: 5, Didn't vote: 5
6/ At this point, the "Wykop Effect" is now in full force, and the mainstream media are beginning to write about the issue. Examples of publications from more reliable and well-known media: 1, 2, 3
In addition, all sorts of commentators, influencers and various other social media figures + some politicians also write about it, some even manage to enrage their constituents
7/ Here we are.
Note that there are a lot of inconsistencies in individual posts, but also in individual media articles. This is characteristic of this "affair". Some sources say that no one at all except volunteers will be taken for the exercise, others that there will be 200000 people, others that several thousand. The form and timing of the exercises also varies, from 33 days as in "patient zero" from the Wykop, to 2 days as in a recent interview with the WCR's head of recruitment
As for the bill and the vote, it's worth noting that one of the biggest misrepresentations right now is to blame the issue on the current law. Yes, such a provision for the possibility of calling up a passive reserve for exercises exists, and deputies actually voted for this law. However, this is not a new provision.
In the amendment to the law from 2014, adopted by the Ewa Kopacz government, one can find:
1a. The peacetime military service obligation of persons transferred to the reserve who are not reserve soldiers shall consist of military exercises.
The law introduces the possibility of a civilian with a military category being called up for compulsory military exercises. Interestingly, concerns were already raised back then, and the military leadership reassured the public that this regulation is just a legal loophole, and that in practice they will not use it. Sample article from 2015
TL;DR: It is unclear what is true and what is not. Since 2014, the military has had the legal possibility to call up civilians for military exercises. In all likelihood, a summons does not yet imply the necessity to go to the exercises, but only to appear and present one's opinion on the subject and an individual assessment of whether or not the person will take such exercises. Potentially, if there are any such summons at all, they will mainly involve people in the medical field and, for example, professional drivers and mechanics.
@AM_Zukowska is a member of parliament, left-wing. Translation of some tweets:
@KorolukM: I pay mandatory taxes and expect the government to ensure my defense from that, not treat me like potential cannon meat. If it's not enough, I can pay more.
If you like the state shitting into your face, then by all means, no kink shaming. But don't throw that shit at others.
@AM_Zukowska: That is, how exactly, with whom is it to provide defense? Someone has to serve in the army and in case of war the state has to have trained conscripts. Sorry. Ideally, wars would not exist. But there have been wars since the dawn of mankind.
@nalu__xx: For you to write such a thing.... Well, I won't say that I'm not disappointed
@AM_Zukowska: I wrote that, because I feel responsible for the country.
@MoistureBusters: And is Private Anna-Maria going for training too?
@AM_Zukowska: I do not have a military qualification. I think that, unfortunately, with an eye defect of -7 diopters and retinal detachment I would not get one.
@Vimis23: So then what do you think, compulsory service for men and women? What do you say to that? Everyone for conscription. Equality is equality.
@AM_Zukowska: There has been no compulsory conscription for anyone since 2009. Military service is voluntary. There are, however, military exercises for those with a Category A military qualification. Since 2014, they are no longer only for reserve soldiers, because since 2009 we have less and less reserve.
I've also translated a text published by "Krytyka Polityczna", which is left-wing. Relevant context: in February there was a poll asking about support for mandatory conscription, here are the results, by gender. Women: 49% for, 47% against. Men: 39% for, 58% against.
Translation is in the separate comment (reply to this one), due to character count limit.
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
Feminists! Where are you, when the motherland calls for reservists?
Paulina Januszewska
KP journalist
DECEMBER 9, 2022
"Where are the feminist organizations when men get drafted into the army?" the graduates of the University of Peasant Reason ask. Let me now explain.
("Peasant's reason" is an idiom roughly equivalent to "common sense")
If I were to use the same rhetoric as the University of Peasant Reason, which demands compulsory conscription and military service for women as well, and preferably for feminists ("after all, you're all about equality, aren't you?"), I would have to write that you, dear men, have wound the whip on yourselves.
The patriarchy you have established generates conflicts that are later resolved violently and forces you to be cannon fodder, in certain circles called reservists. You are the ones who have decided that gender determines who is fit to fight and who is not. I don't know about that, but I do know that in your battles - those fought in or out of uniform - women also die.*
The argument "women, now you have what you wanted, now go to war" is in fact a misunderstanding of the flagship assumptions of the drive towards emancipation.
No - the fact that a woman becomes a soldier, even a General, is not a celebration for feminism. Just as it is not, for example, when women head greedy corporations or referee soccer matches at the World Cup, which violates human rights, exploits, promotes homophobia and sexism.
While the establishment of quotas in the army may appear to be an equalitarian demand, and indeed rubs the nose in the face of gender stereotypes that assume women are physically weaker than men and unfit for military service, it actually represents an extremely neoliberal and ignorant approach to gender justice that ignores opposition to oppression.
Above all, however, it fails to answer much more legitimate questions about the role of the military and the toxic, impacting everyone "forms of masculinity it creates and supports." This is exactly what Shreshtha Das wrote about, commenting on what happened two years ago in India, and pointing out that "equal roles for women in the army over there are not a victory for feminists." She was referring to a ruling by India's Supreme Court, which, in spite of the government's sexist objections, ruled that gender could not be an obstacle to high-ranking positions in the military and permanent service.
Das recalled that "the military, as a place where blatant hypermasculinity explodes, reinforces hegemonic male notions of aggressiveness, strength and heterosexual prowess in and out of the barracks." Femininity, in turn, is therein an insult and a reason for abuse, as the experiences of harassed, raped, paid less than their male counterparts, shunned from important tasks/positions and ridiculed female members (but also male members) of the armies around the world make clear.
A soldier in the Polish special forces GROM, co-founder and president of the #SayStopFoundation, Katarzyna Kozlowska, once told me about the realities faced by women in the uniformed services:
"You can't avoid the rough advances there. By accepting them, you are treated like a whore, by rejecting - even worse. On top of that, entering the ranks of the military or police, women immediately get the patch of the physically weaker. Men think that since women are inserting themselves over there on their own volition, the hermetic, masculinized and hierarchical environment can dictate any conditions to them. Meanwhile, a female soldier or guard - as a strong woman, after all - should not complain, but manfully endure everything, including when watered down with a coarse, chauvinistic sauce of abuse"
To use a word: putting women in the camouflage, their entry into such male-centered structures, has nothing to do with women's liberation or equating femininity with masculinity. It is merely a gendered "promotion" bestowed by men, a necessity to symbolically put on pants and get rid of everything that could be considered unmanly.
This, by the way, also works against those men who are shown their place in the military hierarchy with aggression and violence (mental and physical) or, for example, who are ridiculed or humiliated there for their homosexuality.
The army is a generator and reproducer of the violence of oppression against which all social emancipation movements headed by feminism are fighting. Therefore, the half-witted expectation that women should join it willingly, with a smile on their lips and male anointment, is nonsense.
While we demand recognition and equal rights, we don't want an equal share of the harms produced by patriarchy. We want those harms to be none - or at least less.
University of Peasant Reason goes on to say, "since we, men, have to go into the army and die, you women must too." (...) it forgets that war means the death of civilians, that it uses a particularly cruel tool - rape. And it so happens that the latter largely involves women, who would often rather die than experience it.
Shreshtha Das reminds us that "the military and the hypermasculinity it promotes also harms women who do not live in areas controlled by the military." In doing so, she cites a 2004 study by Catherine Lutz, clearly showing that rates of domestic violence are three to five times higher among military couples than among civilians, because "the military as an institution that promotes the idea of heterosexual male supremacy glorifies power and control or discipline, and suggests that violence is often a necessary means to achieve its own ends."
You read that right. The year is 2023, Poland. The country is in a panic over military mobilization, triggered by media reports of an increase in the number of reservists in the state army. And Polish male hussars are howling on the Internet: "what about women?".
I'll just reiterate: the main problem of those who insist on the forced conscription of women into the army is that they misunderstand feminism. The coercion to become cannon fodder, on the other hand, is a patriarchal assumption that strikes at any gender.
If the graduates of the University of Peasant Reason wanted to stay in reality for a while, they would learn that there is a not inconsiderable group of men and women who want to join the soldier ranks. And I'm not just talking about the ranks of war-fetishizing nationalists or All-Polish Youth. Maj. Konrad Radzik, spokesman for the Military Complements Headquarters in Rzeszow, told "Wyborcza" that since the beginning of the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine, "interest in all forms of military service has increased by about 100 percent - including among women." Besides, there is no shortage of Ukrainian women grabbing weapons of their own volition either.
So there is no doubt that in the face of threats like the one posed by Russia today, the desire to train and defend themselves will grow in societies. If the war escalates, it will force many men and women to adopt defensive measures no matter what their willingness or reluctance to armed conflict.
However, no one has the right to impose on anyone the decision to join the regular army. Indeed, movements striving for equality do not have on their agenda the rewriting of a masculinized world into one that will continue to be violent, with the difference that the oppressors will become women for a change.
The trouble of men sharing idiotic posters on their social media with the slogan "show you're a real femina, fight for equality in reserve exercises" lies in masculine fear. In the Polish state's deprivation of men's choices. You know, the same choice that women in Poland do not have, at least in the matter of aborting a pregnancy.
Your fear of military service, your disagreement with the state deciding for you without you, however, is not the fault of feminists. It is the fault of the oppression of the patriarchy and men in power in Poland. If you choose to oppose them, we will go with you. But don't expect us to be happy that you wish for us as badly as you wish for yourselves.
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)
Well, I suppose it's better that people get their rocks off on some seedy website. After all it's just fantasy, and the people running the site make it clear they don't condone anyone actually trying to do this sort of stuff.
This reminded me of... this story. But here, author does make it clear that she'd really like it to happen. (especially in the comment section)
"There was a virus. It was an artificial virus, and it infected the entire world. It was called PNY-1, for Polytranscriptase Nuclear Y-chromatin, and the one was because it was the first, and hopefully only, virus of its kind."
"There was a fan of the show, or maybe a small group - that part is not known for sure - that had a lot of smarts. He, or they, understood biochemistry and genetic recombination. Whoever it was called themselves 'The Conversion Bureau'. They were kind of like computer hackers, only they hacked biology instead. A lot of people in the early decades of the century had laboratories in their garages, and played around with home genetic engineering, hacking DNA. The 'Conversion Bureau' made the virus because of that show."
"Why? Why did they do it? And what does any of that have to do with..." Dylan dropped his eyes "...With boys having to wear bras?"
"[Humans are] A lot gentler. A lot kinder. A lot more concerned with the feelings of others. The Pony virus changed a lot of things, Dylan. It increased the amount of oxytocin all bodies make. That's a hormone that helps make us care and be nurturing. When mothers care for their children, their bodies are flooded with the stuff. But men used to have very little of it."
"Were men mean, before the Pony virus?"
"Well... I guess they were. There were hundreds of wars, all over the planet, all the time. Every single day, there was about one hundred wars going on. Now we don't have any. There aren't any armies anymore. Nobody sees the point of having an army, because all of the money to make weapons and train soldiers is used to feed people, and clothe them, and make sure everyone has a place to live." The world was pretty scary before the Pony virus, Richard had to admit.
"Oxytocin was only part of it. The virus changed the part of the genes that controlled territoriality and aggression too, and it also... cut the level of testosterone by two thirds. Testosterone is the male hormone. It makes men hairy... or it used to anyway... but it also made them extra aggressive, and extra territorial, and... well... horny all the time. So men were pretty frustrated, and they also were... I guess... a little more mean and prone to anger and violence." Richard decided to leave out the old statistics that showed that 98% of all violence was committed by males alone. Testosterone was probably a very big factor. Maybe the creators of the Pony virus had intended everything after all.
"So... the virus basically made men... less like men." Dylan was a smart kid. He'd pretty much hit the nail on the head.
"Um... yeah. Pretty much. Having breasts is just incidental. The real point was to make males act more like females, to make them more caring, more concerned with feelings, less violent, and less aggressive. That's why there are no more violent contact sports, no more wars, and no more hunger. No man can stand to let another man die in a ditch anymore." Richard watched the boys playing jump-rope. A smaller child wanted to play. They had welcomed him in, and took the time to gently teach him how to play. He couldn't imagine boys doing that when he had been growing up. "But the virus also affected women too, son. It made them even more nurturing than they ever were before as well. Both men and women were made less violent, aggressive, and more caring overall. And it only took eight weeks to spread to every human on earth."
From "Author's note":
Every single thing in The Friendship Virus is based on fact. More, these facts are acknowledged by all the educated, professional men of the world. Not a bit of any of this is the least bit in dispute. I know these things because not only do I study and research, had a parent involved in enforcement, but... I can use Google.
As you can. Everything above is just the first of ten thousand pages verifying everything I wrote.
I have received a lot of crap about this one, single story among my more than one million words of storytelling, and every bit of it comes from one thing: boys who don't like hearing the truth - a truth understood and recognized by all real men in positions of power, authority and enforcement of law and order.
Within FimFiction, she has her own section in the CB universe called “The Chatoyaverse”. JDR authored an enormous number of stories herself, some as part of a series, others as one-offs. However, they generally share the same elements: The magical barrier is expanding and will not only kill all humans, but destroy their civilization too, erasing mankind’s entire culture from existence. In the original story, the exact nature of the barrier was left vague, other than it extends from Equestria, would “heal the Earth”, is harmful to Humans, and humanity is already dying out. But in JDR’s stories, Celestia deliberately created the barrier to wipe out humans.
Humans are harmed by the magical barrier because they have no magic, which is because they have no souls, which is also why they’re pure evil. Technology is also pure evil, which is why the barrier destroys it too. Men are especially evil, in which JDR claims they’re responsible for 98% of all the world’s violence and rape, and the only way to cure them is to make them more feminine. Failing that, castration works too.
Celestia is an immortal goddess doing this for their own good, as are the other ponies. Not only does the potion turn all evil humans into perfect ponies, but the potion is explicitly said to completely alter the user’s mind by removing any negative thoughts from their brain. It also makes the ponies unwaveringly loyal to Celestia, even if before they were the most hardcore pro-human rebels. Also, they are reprogrammed to be pansexual. Critics have likened this to mind control and brainwashing, making the prospect of being turned into a pony even more disturbing. But it doesn’t stop there; in one particular story, the natural-born ponies are the product of centuries long eugenics program to breed out undesirable traits; ponies are superior because she deliberately made them so.
Her justification for Celestia’s questionable actions is: “In my stories superior beings - truly superior beings - can do things that if a lesser being, like a human, were to do, it would indeed be evil."
Fine I believe that you and other HBDists are motivated less by a desire of truth than by a desire to see your preexisting prejudices validated and that the refusal of others to provide you with that validation is indignant anger.
Does it include Scott
I suspect that race issues helped lead to the discrediting of IQ tests which helped lead to college degrees as the sole determinant of worth which helped lead to everyone having to go to a four-year college which helped lead to massive debt crises, poverty, and social immobility (I am assuming you can fill in the holes in this argument).
I think they’re correct that “you are racist and sexist” is a very strong club used to bludgeon any group that strays too far from the mainstream – like Silicon Valley tech culture, libertarians, computer scientists, atheists, rationalists, et cetera. For complicated reasons these groups are disproportionately white and male, meaning that they have to spend an annoying amount of time and energy apologizing for this. I’m not sure how much this retards their growth, but my highball estimate is “a lot”.
and Gwern?
the massive fall in genome sequencing costs means that large human datasets will be produced, and the genetics directly examined, eliminating entire areas of objections to the previous heredity studies. And at some point, some researcher will manage the study - some group inside or outside the USA will fund it, at some point a large enough genetic database will be cross-referenced against IQ tests and existing racial markers.
I don’t know when the definitive paper will come out, if it’ll be this year, or by 2020, although I would be surprised if there was still nothing by 2030; but it will happen and it will happen relatively soon (for a debate going on for the past century or more). Genome sequencing is simply going to be too cheap for it to not happen. By 2030 or 2040, I expect the issue will be definitively settled in the same way earlier debates about the validity of IQ tests were eventually settled (even if the public hasn’t yet gotten the word, the experts all concede that IQ tests are valid, reliable, not biased, and meaningful predictors of a wide variety of real-world variables).
Edit: originally I linked, but I decided against it for now. While it's technically publically available, one only as an archive and second, on someone else's website...
Sinity
1yr ago
Taking an oath is not weird at all.
I was saying that forced oath is weird. I mean, just force someone to serve. Sure, it might be immoral but whatever.
But... forcing an oath? Kinda defeats the whole point of an oath.
Sinity
1yr ago
What would "global censorship" even look like
Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing; relevant text from 2012
Today we have marketing departments that say things such as "we don't need computers, we need appliances. Make me a computer that doesn't run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn't run programs that I haven't authorized that might undermine our profits."
On the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea: a program that does one specialized task. After all, we can put an electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and we don't worry if it's still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. But that's not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance. We're not making a computer that runs only the "appliance" app; we're taking a computer that can run every program, then using a combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn't want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer—it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box.
(...)
The copyright wars are just the beta version of a long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry is just the first belligerents to take up arms, and we tend to think of them as particularly successful. After all, here is SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage, ready to break the Internet on a fundamental level— all in the name of preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies.
But the reality is that copyright legislation gets as far as it does precisely because it's not taken seriously by politicians.
Why might other sectors come to nurse grudges against computers in the way the entertainment business already has? The world we live in today is made of computers. We don't have cars anymore; we have computers we ride in. We don't have airplanes anymore; we have flying Solaris boxes attached to bucketfuls of industrial control systems. A 3D printer is not a device, it's a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer. A radio is no longer a crystal: it's a general-purpose computer, running software.
(...) this was the year in which we saw the debut of open source shape files for converting AR-15 rifles to full-automatic. This was the year of crowd-funded open-sourced hardware for genetic sequencing. And while 3D printing will give rise to plenty of trivial complaints, there will be judges in the American South and mullahs in Iran who will lose their minds over people in their jurisdictions printing out sex toys. The trajectory of 3D printing will raise real grievances, from solid-state meth labs to ceramic knives.
It doesn't take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers. Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it's really important to make sure that computers can't execute programs which cause specialized peripherals to output custom organisms which literally eat their lunch.
Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or hysterical fears, they are, nevertheless, the political currency of lobbies and interest groups far more influential than Hollywood and big content. Every one of them will arrive at the same place: "Can't you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can't you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?"
There will be programs that run on general-purpose computers, and peripherals, that will freak even me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general-purpose computers will find a receptive audience. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, protocols or messages will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy. As we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits, and all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship.
And yet, it is a moral crisis. Changes in technology cannot be blamed here. Just as the opportunity to steal separates thieves from honest men, the opportunity to overeat reveals the gluttons among us
Yet curiously, their gluttony disappears when sth like Tirzepatide is introduced into their bodies.
But it's sad, frankly, when people tell themselves that they can never lose weight. Because some of them will believe it.
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.
It's darkly amusing to be proven right. People thought that technology will disrupt traditional governance, and instead we're seeing bureaucratic sanctions effectively enforced against abstract cryptographic protocols. Social technology and human networking keep trampling over nerdy bullshit.
HN comment
Clickbaity title. As the article outlines inside 63% of currently produced blocks are OFAC compliant. With an ETH block time of ~12 seconds. There is a 1-(.63^n) chance that an OFAC non-compliant block will be included in n blocks. Once you hit 90 seconds, there's a >99% chance that an OFAC non-compliant transaction will be written to the chain.
Maybe it's not quite over? It doesn't seem to be getting much worse.
Kiwifarms
Which now operates in the clearnet without issues, seemingly.
Sinity
1yr ago
First, on a personal note, this is exactly what I stoner-hot-take predicted Musk would do with Twitter in a prior motte thread. This freaks me out. Not that it's all that creative a take, but it's something I've noticed before when I was spending too much time in narrow epistemic corners (team fan blogs, fashion blogs) where I'd start to think the same thoughts that showed up on the blogs a week later.
Funnily enough, ~same for me. Tho I suggested this nearly half a year ago, so maybe that's a little different... Link
Optional moderation. Say, someone thinks /u/ZorbaTHut is great at removing content which they don't want to see. So they subscribe to his moderation services - and they don't see this content anymore. Some other people think he's doing it wrong - and they see this content.
Twitter could have default list of mods, and it would function exactly as it does now - except interested people could selectively unsubscribe from that.
Everyone wins! Except for the people who want to block people from consensually communicating with each other.
I mean, it wouldn't even be that much of a change on Reddit. Just assume Administrators do not moderate, there's no Anti-Evil Ops, subreddit mods become "default mods" - each of which could be unsubscribed for - and people could subscribe to the nonstandard mods too.
And so there would never be deleted comments/posts - only hidden from the people who don't want to see them.
.........
Shout out to the mods of themotte, would themotte be usable in your judgment without that kind of basic filtering?
Zorba responded, explaining why it might not work; not quoting it here because of the length. So probably not(?).
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.
There's a book written by a polish author, Jacek Dukaj - "Ice". I didn't read it yet, but I thought it might interest some of the people here, especially @DaseindustriesLtd. English wikipedia claims there's Russian translation, but I'm not sure. No English translation yet.
The story of the book takes place in an alternate universe where the First World War never occurred and Poland is still under Russian rule. Following the Tunguska event, the Ice, a mysterious form of matter, has covered parts of Siberia in Russia and started expanding outwards, reaching Warsaw. The appearance of Ice results in extreme decrease of temperature, putting the whole continent under constant winter, and is accompanied by Lute, angels of Frost, a strange form of being which seems to be a native inhabitant of Ice. Under the influence of the Ice, iron turns into zimnazo (cold iron), a material with extraordinary physical properties, which results in the creation of a new branch of industry, zimnazo mining and processing, giving birth to large fortunes and new industrial empires. Moreover, the Ice freezes History and Philosophy, preserving the old political regime, affecting human psychology and changing the laws of logic from many-valued logic of "Summer" to two-valued logic of "Winter" with no intermediate steps between True and False.
Dukaj noted that in this book, science in science-fiction stands for the philosophy of history.
Plot section explains what this last sentence means, but it seems too spoiler'y.
Here's a partial (3%) translation[2] of his other book I did read, "Perfect Imperfection". I'm not sure how faithful it is; he uses fancy language structures. It has Russian translation; quote from English wiki: "One of many original twists in the book is the new language, such as new grammar and prefixes that try to describe the posthuman beings (somewhat resembling the concept of gender-neutral language). This language play also makes the book especially challenging for translators. The book's translation to Russian was nominated for a Russian awards for best translations" <yep, trying to translate it with Deepl was a struggle>
I put off reading his other books after I bounced several times from one called "Science Fiction"; IIRC I kept getting lost b/c of how meta it is (and the first time I read Perfect Imperfection I really got it only on second reread due to defamiliarization[1]).
Actually, I just remembered that besides "Perfect Imperfection" I also did read his "Black Oceans". It was good, but not very thought provoking in a way Perfect Imperfection was. But now that I looked at the Wiki, this seems interesting (given it was written in 2001):
Technological trends are far from only ones explored by Dukaj in his book. He portrays the futuristic bureaucracy, political power struggles behind private sector, government and the military, and changes in culture. Dukaj extrapolates from the current trend of increasing lawsuits and political correctness: in his world many people willingly live under constant mass surveillance of the New Etiquette (NEti), which registers all their actions so that they couldn't be falsely accused of some "personal offense crime".
He's apparently switching from writing to making video games. Translated polish article:
Jacek Dukaj has announced that he has established the Nolensum studio, which will produce video games based on his works. The first project will be "Hardware Dreams," a virtual adaptation of the novel " The Old Axolotl." That title has received international acclaim, with two TV series based on it - the Belgian "Into the Night" and the Turkish "Yakamoz S-245". The director of the game, also responsible for its visual side, is Maciej Jackiewicz: art director and co-creator of numerous animations and cinematics for games ("Cyberpunk 2077", "The Witcher")
[Dukaj's quote] You can write on paper and you can write into the world. For many years, I have watched closely as the center of gravity of culture has shifted from forms based on writing to audiovisual media. A technological revolution is advancing that makes it possible to experience the content of these media in direct sensory experiences. Much of my work has described the consequences of such transformations. Until the time came when at least some of these ideas of mine, instead of on paper, I can realize for real, out in the world. The work in which I most fully described the world of metaverses, NFTs, universal guaranteed income, the social credit system and similar phenomena was 2010's "Line of Resistance." From it comes the term "nolensum", meaning the situation when technological civilization meets our needs so well that we have to artificially create identities and goals for ourselves. The need to engineer people's sense of life arises. And the pioneers of engineering the meaning of life are the first practitioners of gamification of the human destiny: computer game developers.
The richness of Dukaj's worlds is of a scale that the budgets of Hollywood blockbusters would not be ashamed of," says Marcin Kobylecki, creative producer. - "Hardware Dreams is distinguished by its universality and scalability. Its plot is set in Tokyo, and the post-apocalyptic vision of life in a computer network is sure to gain the attention of audiences around the world.
The strategic plan is to gradually expand the team and production capacity so that Nolensum simultaneously develops several projects. Not necessarily just games. Nolensum is affiliated (through the Bellwether Rocks fund, in which Dukaj is also a shareholder and board member) with companies involved in NFTs, cryptocurrencies, metaverse and tokenization, among others.
Nolensum has secured full funding for the first year and a half of production. In the near future, Nolensum also intends to work with outside contractors.
Nolensum. Sounds promising.
[1] There are concepts / technologies which are just not explained for sth like first half of the book, in order to immerse reader in post-singularity world by showing it from a perspective of someone from ~near-future. (/u/gwern described his It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World as doing the same thing)
[2] Because I figured I'd try to translate it. Unfortunately I asked for the permission, wrongly expecting I'd just get no response, most likely. In hindsight, that was stupid.
Sinity
1yr ago
Feminist utopian larp doesn’t have an answer. Neither does communist utopian larp.
@hydroacetylene: in general yes. There are some disturbing answers / fantasies through. Link
A lot gentler. A lot kinder. A lot more concerned with the feelings of others. The Pony virus changed a lot of things, Dylan. It increased the amount of oxytocin all bodies make. That's a hormone that helps make us care and be nurturing. When mothers care for their children, their bodies are flooded with the stuff. But men used to have very little of it."
"Were men mean, before the Pony virus?" It was a difficult question.
"Well... I guess they were. There were hundreds of wars, all over the planet, all the time. Every single day, there was about one hundred wars going on. Now we don't have any. There aren't any armies anymore. Nobody sees the point of having an army, because all of the money to make weapons and train soldiers is used to feed people, and clothe them, and make sure everyone has a place to live." The world was pretty scary before the Pony virus, Richard had to admit.
"And war stopped because of that oxy hormone?"
"No. Not just that. Oxytocin was only part of it. The virus changed the part of the genes that controlled territoriality and aggression too, and it also... cut the level of testosterone by two thirds. Testosterone is the male hormone. It makes men hairy... or it used to anyway... but it also made them extra aggressive, and extra territorial, and... well... horny all the time. So men were pretty frustrated, and they also were... I guess... a little more mean and prone to anger and violence." Richard decided to leave out the old statistics that showed that 98% of all violence was committed by males alone. Testosterone was probably a very big factor. Maybe the creators of the Pony virus had intended everything after all.
"So... the virus basically made men... less like men." Dylan was a smart kid. He'd pretty much hit the nail on the head.
"Um... yeah. Pretty much. Having breasts is just incidental. The real point was to make males act more like females, to make them more caring, more concerned with feelings, less violent, and less aggressive. That's why there are no more violent contact sports, no more wars, and no more hunger. No man can stand to let another man die in a ditch anymore." Richard watched the boys playing jump-rope. A smaller child wanted to play. They had welcomed him in, and took the time to gently teach him how to play. He couldn't imagine boys doing that when he had been growing up. "But the virus also affected women too, son. It made them even more nurturing than they ever were before as well. Both men and women were made less violent, aggressive, and more caring overall. And it only took eight weeks to spread to every human on earth."
Dylan sat up, hugging his knees to his chest, gently. His painted toenails matched his sisters, they had painted them together the night before. "So basically, the world sucked before the Pony virus."
Richard had to think about it. Decades of masculinity fought in his mind with the reality of the new world he now lived in. Gone was Hockey, Rugby, American Football. Gone was being macho, tough, and hard. The old action heroes and the old war heroes were all monsters now. Being a man was defined more by being pretty than by being rough and tumble.
But there was no war. The world shared, now. It was unthinkable to let people starve. It was even more unthinkable to invade and kill anyone. Rape had ended almost overnight. A night at the pub ended with singing, and not with a fight. And women finally had real and lasting equality in the world. It was like living on a different earth.
But it was a better one. Even though his background, everything he had been taught screamed inside of him, he was a scientist, he was a smart man. Richard had to admit. It was better.
The world had been converted into something new and strange, but it was a safer world. A friendlier world. A less violent and more nurturing world. Whoever those gene hackers were, or whoever it was, had done what all of the philosophers and pundits and saviors had all failed to do. They had made the Earth a planet of peace and relative harmony.
In the comments, author references stats about male violence a lot; shame no one brought up stats about technology and science... I suspect author would just claim it's irrelevant and it's all because of women being kept down by men tho.
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
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
There's an update; tho it doesn't exactly change anything about credibility
https://unknought.tumblr.com/post/699908646940901376/so-kelsey-has-confirmed-in-a-fairly-public
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
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
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 :|
Yeah, generally I agree with this now.
(Though while it's a decent argument for subreddits, Discords, small forums like this, etc., it's a lot less appropriate of an argument for larger open platforms like Twitter or Facebook which shouldn't necessarily be expected to have one unified culture. So I'd say bring on the subscription-based jannyism only there.)
Yep; while it wouldn't work that well in communities like themotte, it makes sense on a platform. Reddit, if not for admins interfering, is a pretty good model, I think. Instead of global, unified forum with global moderators, there are subreddits for entire communities, with their own mods. It makes sense.
An improvement on that might be tags-based system - allow posting into multiple places at once. Mods moderate tags they set up. Tags would allow some fancy solutions; for example, mods of #programming might enforce the rule that humor/memes has to be tagged #humor too. And so user can look at "#programming -#humor" if they want only serious posts. And #humor aggregates humor for all kinds of topics.
Through that would cause problems you describe, to some extent, in the comments. But maybe it's still better UX than crossposting?
Some people say that power over humans is just fundamentally not as interesting to intelligent people as playing with abstractions and earning six figures while being a vulnerable serf, which entirely filters out geniuses. I call them nerds and press (x) for doubt.
Power over humans might be poorly scalable / unreliable / limited by luck. Soft sciences are rather incapable compared to STEM stuff. Maybe 160 IQ focused into math does miracles, while 160 IQ focused into soft stuff lets you predict people to some impressive - but not that terrifying - degree? Human brains are complex systems. And then there are interactions between them. Also, since industrial revolution (or maybe earlier, to some extent), such a genius needs to also take into account crazy changes in tech too.
And then there's other similarly (or significantly) intelligent people to deal with.
Random crap happens and shapes world events to some extent. Does anyone remember ACTA? I was in middle school at the time. I can't remember clearly how, but I stumbled upon some random IRC channel and also Facebook group "protesting" it (just few thousands of users complaining pointlessly, on platform). There were few people on the IRC channel, and they DoSed some random government website. No idea what they were expecting. I didn't really expect anything to happen, but I posted link to the IRC channel, and a link to some JS DoS utility, along with some instructions. I posted that several times, expecting it to just get lost in the flood of messages. Shortly after that I went AFK for 0.5-1h. When I went back there were several hundred people on that IRC channel and apparently they managed to bring some sites down.
So TV news covered it, the same or the next day. In the following days, it was few thousand people on that channel. And also someone defaced one gov site. Some news coverage, 2. No idea if that log is from the same channel.
After it was in the news, physical protests started, and soon spread all over EU. Various elected politicians beclowned themselves rather hard. It was the CurrentThing for some time.
The European Union didn't ruin its energy policy because of being fractured more than the US of A is.
USA also crippled their nuclear tech. EU got caught with pants down because they expected Putin to be "rational". Which was maybe wrong, but not necessarily stupid or unreasonable.
Cutting chip exports to China - is it really high int move, and not simply some base competence?
Sinity
1yr ago
Yeah but the 'dead drop' system seems pretty good. Providing your home address to the counterparty seems horribly risky.
In Poland we have something seemingly even better. Customer pays in Monero into the Escrow (operated by darknet forum admin), and provides a parcel locker's location code. And also what they ordered + some contact info (this is the weak part, most sellers use some properiary communicator called Wickr).
They just send it to a given parcel locker and when it arrives, you get the code to open it. Overall, it seems absurdly safe. And there are 20000+ locations in the country to choose from.
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.
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