Templexious
Stuck in time
User ID: 2308
Templexious
1mo ago
I have nothing but applause for your constitution in being able to endure everything between those polar points.
Templexious
1mo ago
I've yet to see the mods knock an actually-good two-to-three paragraph post, so I'm dubious this is a report on the reality of the moderation's behaviors.
Seems self-evident that it's more difficult to moderate six+ paragraphs with five sentences each on each comment.
Templexious
1mo ago
In an unrelated note, since there's no better places to discuss this, instituting a more strict character count per comment would bring a breath of fresh air to the thread.
Reading the motte has become a dull slog, and many of these top-level comments consist of word soup with BIG TITLES pretending to say something meaningful without corresponding substance.
Templexious
3mo ago
I find the need for "steelmanning" of trump to be silly.
He's running for president. People like him for what he stands for. They can vote for whoever they want, it's a republic with tinges of democracy.
I will be voting Democrat because I don't like Russia/Putin, but that's the extent of my reasoning for my presidential picks. I understand and see why people like Trump, and to say that he's being unduly attacked because he doesn't "fit in" to the establishment is not a lie.
They're very clearly trying to pin him to the wall for things that would be relatively minor scandals with a few fees and a public apology and then it would be over with any other ex-president. It's really satisfying to see how hard the establishment strains at gnats to pin him to the wall, when we know that they've gotten used to letting people like epstein go around as an open secret.
Templexious
3mo ago
This thought occurred after Christmas this year during a few activities where family members wanted to play a game, so they pulled up a YouTube video to demonstrate how a thing is done, and it was incredibly gross.
99% of modern kids will never have the ability to be forgotten- parents post their pictures online when they're not able to give consent, including embarrassing and compromised photos. This includes YouTube videos of moms putting their daughters in compromised positions and posting them on the video site.
Such videos are easy to find- the mom often speaks, and their prepubescent girls do a seemingly-innocuous activity. Those girls will always have those videos on a stranger's hard drive at best, or at worst, end up as data used for ai generation.
I'll note that I don't have a proposed solution to this. The laws on child-porn already exist, but this content skirts the edge of acceptability. The girls are usually 10-13, and doing an innocuous activity- like playing pattycake or ring around the rosie, usually in mostly-acceptable clothing.
When you stumble on one such video, you can tell what I'm talking about. It's the camera angles.
For this reason, I come to TheMotte- have you seen the videos I'm talking about? What do you think about them, and how would you evaluate whether or not such content is okay to post online?
If you have kids, do you worry that there's some random perusing Instagram or willing to train ai on them?
After seeing these things, I can't get it out of my head, nor can I come up with a reasonable solution.
Templexious
4mo ago
The thing is that the romney campaign didn't reciprocate with those punches, and instead held their tongues.
Templexious
4mo ago
That mitt romney article reminds me of one from the bush campaign where they claimed that the John Kerry kids were awful and rude and used slurs and a bunch of other bullshit.
His kids at the time were two-four years old. People will write literally anything during campaign years, so long as it makes the other side look bad.
Templexious
4mo ago
Tangentially to this, toward the end of the bush years, there were media reports on msnbc and cnn that basically questioned whether or not bin laden even existed.
No one else remembers that, but good to know people still believe that he existed.
Templexious
4mo ago
The trick to competition in my experience is building up an internal mythos for why one loses while absorbing other intuitions for how to actually win.
Every person I know who wins a lot that also loses a lot has this ability to shunt the pain of losses into the ether. They may also just know exactly why they lost and what they do to correct it.
Still, I find myself in a similar boat as you. I avoid public competitions, as I am not very competitive, though for me it's not the pain of losing- there's no personal investment when losing. But if I think I have a chance, I'll give it a shot.
Templexious
4mo ago
oh it's this guy again
My top 5 candidates to be techno-king in 20-30 years:
- Sam Altman
- Elon Musk
- John Carmack
- Demis hassabis
- Xi
Unless Sam exits ai development, he is the most likely candidate for the future techno-king in the US.
Xi is obvious- all corps in china are extensions of the state, so whatever ai is built will be built with oversight from The Party officials, and whatever Xi wants.
Templexious
4mo ago
The mid-late 90s were a pretty excellent time period to be alive.
I'd skip vietnam and nix nixon. I certainly wouldn't complain about going to see Queen in concert or buying in on the 90s tech sector.
Templexious
4mo ago
I was wondering if anyone would call me out on the use of whence. Congrats! 🧐
Templexious
4mo ago
To whence shall we roll back the clock?
We joke about the glory years, the years when Things Were Better, which just so happen to coincide with people's younger years. You get me to say what years I would like to roll back the clock to and live, I would probably say somewhere around the 90s-late 00s. I am an outlier, as far as I know. Virtually no one I know would like to roll back the clock to spitting distance from two thousand and fucking-eight.
Back when the most lefty thing on the internet was a girl telling people that she didn't appreciate being propositioned for sex on an elevator. Pre-tiktok, the era of old forums. The iphone still a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye. The era when Google and Microsoft weren't the undisputed emperors of your lives.
Actually, forget that. We all know there's nowhere to roll back to, we can only roll forward, embracing the aesthetics of what we imagined the past to be. I, for one, am glad that I am not eternally inundated with "WOW DAE PARENTS ARE BOOORIIINNG????" ads. You can pull my 70-lb tub of legos accumulated over more than twenty years out of my cold, dead hands, NSA. And it's probably true that in the next 30-40 years that democracy and republicanism-as-we-know it will no longer exist.
No seriously, whence come the true techno-king? Who are the contenders for the first immortal god-king of humanity. I joke in the phrasing, but it is not exactly an incorrect joke now, is it? It is very probable that we will have the first actual trillionaire human in the next thirty years. The first effectively-emperors of mankind.
The only reason companies don't do governance of humans is that they're shit at it, actually, and Democracy is surprisingly efficient over long timescales. But assume for the sake of thought experiment, that the singularity happens, and we have our first crowned god-emperor of humanity thanks to the creation of AGI. Who are our contenders?
Personally, I should expect them to:
- Be in AI or AGI development already or in the next 2-3 years
- Be incredibly wealthy already
- Likely be from a company currently valued at least in the tens of millions of dollars
As such, pick your top 5 most likely individuals to become humanity's first true techno-kings, and why. Do you have any you think are sleepers?
I'll hold back my top-fivers for a couple days or so.
Templexious
4mo ago
SJ-ers will continue to exist so long as there are those from oppressed groups who become intellectuals and want to teach their stories.
Will they lose, long-term? Perhaps if they don't openly side with the State of Israel.
Templexious
4mo ago
teachers just don't actually care if our children isn't learning.
Which is why involved parents who will go out of their way to ensure their kids can rotate shapes and will bribe admissions officers to get into the best school, those kids have better outcomes long-term. Because teacher has 30-odd kids to deal with and the odds that your kid gets the attention they need to excel is basically 1/30 even if you factor out teacher biases.
With teacher biases the odds are worse. Parents who realize that teachers don't give a fuck and are able/willing to make up for that fact will have obviously better outcomes. Of course, if you have dumb parents then the kids will probably be dumb too. But instilling a work ethic in kids by way of parent involvement is a quality all its own. No wonder the high-iq middle class have less kids, if they "get" this fact- the amount of energy and resources required to help one kid get out into a top-10 college and therefore career is insane.
Templexious
4mo ago
It's not a particularly surprising reaction, no.
Nor is the rolling over and acting offended that people reacted to IH the way that was entirely expected and predictable?
"Ah yes, these edgy jokes we used caused the expected reaction. Now, we will be offended on IH's behalf toward the people who took the bait."
It would be bad bait if no one took it, no?
Templexious
4mo ago
this individual
"this individual"-ing Nick Bostrom is a hilarious way of wiping away his work in promoting effective altruism and longtermism.
Templexious
4mo ago
Most of the argument is about where the line should be
The number of arguments which boil down to some form of sorites paradox is very annoying.
Templexious
5mo ago
Vote counts should at least be hidden for longer. Perhaps a week. The impulse to focus on upvotes is a siren song.
Templexious
5mo ago
50k potential federal employees turning over every time a president changes would be a pretty massive change in how the government runs. It would make for excellent fireworks.
Templexious
5mo ago
we live in a far from ideal world and budgets aren't infinite, so I have no qualms about letting die those who are an onerous burden.
If the cost is being borne largely by private actors, what cost is it to the government? Surely, if a private individual or charity group is able and willing to direct their funds to keeping those children alive, they should be allowed to, no?
Regardless of earnest hand-wringing about the sanctity of life and how it's beyond such loathsome things as cost-benefit analysis, you don't see the global GDP diverted to help an orphan that fell down a well
You do see people expend hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, to save kids trapped in a cave or save an individual diver who went into a cave, however. Much of that is almost always from the national coffers. To say nothing of charities who's entire goals are to save such people, regardless of said cost.
If society can forward cash from its coffers toward elderly patients at nursing homes, it can spend some money keeping some kids alive. Especially if a society-- hell, an individual- chooses to shoulder that burden, keeping most of the cost of the existence of that child out of a country's own economic burdens. It's one thing to say "the state will not fund this any more" - it's another too deny access and use of private resources.
Templexious
5mo ago
An early example of cancel culture in action
About 10 years ago
I have news for you.. cancel culture has been around for as long as the media and people getting offended have been around.
Templexious
5mo ago
Nursing homes are in aggregate a symptom of a social disease- end of life care for the elderly and the infirm is atrocious.
Society has kicked families out of their homes, and left the elderly out to dry, while simultaneously sucking up adult children's time that would be spent caring for the elderly in their last years.
The problem is that historically, we simply didn't have the technology to keep them all alive, usually, when elderly would spiral, they would spiral relatively fast- infection, diabetes, cancers, all things that had no cure in the ancestral home. In the current era, we just wait for them to decline, and while we have cures for the most major diseases, we have nothing to help the elderly live more fulfilling and yes, even economically-productive lives. They are shoved into a heartless building where they play bingo on Tuesday at nine am and wait for god to come knocking, with the very occasional visit from what remains of the local evangelical churches activities.
Yes, there are problems in nursing homes, but no, there's no incentive to solve it, one way or the other. The country seems locked in indecision on this particular issue. The AARP is the largest focus group in the US, and as a bloc, holds a stranglehold on the younger generation's ability to help them solve their problems. Young and middle-aged voters are similarly out-of-sighting and out-of-minding the entire problem- shove the elderly into a nursing home and visit once a month until they die-if you're nearby. Maybe do a task that the nurses haven't gotten to. Then move away when offered a raise or a new job in a new state.
Ol' granny's got 5 years still left in her, nevermind that she can't make her way to the toilet any more, but her son Kyle is 50 years old and still in his career and living in tennessee, five hundred miles away.
It's usually not very strict, otherwise you would hear about things like subway's breads being classified as cake from the US instead of just the EU.
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