Templexious
Stuck in time
User ID: 2308
Templexious
4mo ago
oh it's this guy again
Templexious
5mo 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
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
5mo 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
7mo ago
It has been interesting to see the inversion of blame posts like this attempt.
Like the theory that the ADL is funding neo-nazis. Why would they do anything like that? It's an insane proposition if they were actually being paid by the ADL. And it has zero upsides. If the ADL had a whistleblower moment it would entirely dismantle their whole organization.
I do have my own conspiracies regarding jewry, but "the ADL is actively stoking anti-semitism" is an incoherent proposition. Toss eggs at me later if there's leaks that show they were wiring money or writing checks funding neo nazi demonstrators, but you'll need to forgive me for being a bit skeptical at this overexplanatory theory that's cropped up the last few months.
Templexious
8mo ago
I appreciate putting the upvotes at the bottom of posts.
Minor suggestion:
Extend the upvote count delay to 2-3 days, or make it require more effort to see them. (Like clicking on a spoiler box) I don't care for the dynamics that having votes visible by default engenders.
Templexious
7mo ago
Yes, but at the end of the day, they cannot simply tell the SS administration they do not need the money to be paid out to them.
Ideally the taxes would outweigh the costs, and it's only a small footnote, however it is indicative, I think, of the structural inefficiency.
Templexious
5mo 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
6mo ago
Have you documented the cause for your swap anywhere?
Templexious
7mo ago
Right. It still leads into conflict with the bit of text from the book of mormon against it and whether or not his existing wife would consent to the polygamy, but I'll concede the point. It is certainly clear the only reason the church walked back the act of sealing men to multiple wives was because of pressure from the country. If the leaders felt the country and rest of the world became more amenable to it, a new revelation would come out reinstituting the policy.
Templexious
7mo ago
That's exactly the line of reasoning and theories I'm rejecting until evidence comes forward.
For the record, I'm not denying that zionism, even jewish supremacist ideologies exist and are propagated without half the measure of scrutiny or being allowed to talk about it.
Templexious
8mo ago
it's a good game, and worth a play. The level design is uneven sometimes, but that seems intentional.
[EDIT: At 24 hrs after my initial post I'll collect all the responses and decide what I want to do with them]
This is a poll question. The idea is to get and understand the people reading this, their takes.
In the optimal scenario, answers wouldn't contaminate the others' responses or reference others' definitions and understanding.
The question: In sociopolitical contexts, what is your personal, off-the-cuff definition or interpretation of the term NPC? Again, I'm not looking for any other thinker's or pundit's definitions of the term, but you, the commenter who responds to me. I already know the concept has already been discussed and mentioned, at length, elsewhere.
If you've never heard the term before, give me a guess of what you would think the term means and what information you pull from. Ideally, answers would be spoilered using the double-pipe notation, IE wrapping the answer with a pair of: || around their responses, without referring to anyone else's response.
To avoid contamination, I'll post my own definition as a response to this comment later.
Templexious
9mo ago
As far as I am aware, it does affect digestion, though I do not know how. Nausea and constipation as well as unnatural stool are common side effects; I haven't had any of those issues personally, but I know a number of people who do.
Your gut craves sugar, and satisfying that causes you not to eat as much. Unfortunately, I'm not studied enough on the subject to say for sure how much more there is to how it acts.
Templexious
9mo ago
I was trying to point out was that there's no indication that a post needs approval, on either the post-creation page or on the sidebar.
While I'm sure a programmatic fix would be the best option for optimizing the time until a moderator approves it, it was mostly that I didn't know the post was in limbo until I checked the front page, saw it missing, and did more investigation.
A simple note of: "All posts for now require moderator approval before being visible on the front page and it may take X-Y hours before a moderator approves it. Contact one if no feedback is received in that timeframe." on the Post creation page would resolve my question (and potentially future posters' questions) with minimal programmer work needed (hopefully).
Excellent, I've never done grey market injectables. How easy are sharps to obtain without a prescription? How long does the powder keep?
I could see myself picking up a month's supply and seeing how it goes.
Edit: Nevermind, it seems I could just use insulin syringes, which are available direct from amazon.
Templexious
10mo ago
Yes.
Templexious
11mo ago
No, we didn't.
An Ascending Elite would probably be the best bet if the main parties would want the US to be/stay independent. There's still an absurd amount of untapped nationalist fervor, and R's gains with minorities showed that most people are still not willing to hop on Popper's wild ride. (That could, perhaps, stem from the terrible messaging of the Hillary 2016 campaign being wildly self-defeating)
Long-term, Christianity is a losing proposition, I agree there, but they only need to hold off long enough for their policies to get in place. Since most Christians are older, own land, have kids, the amount of relative power they have over the country versus the new-age atheists is insane. As such, appealing to older, "family values" and general christian sensibilities makes intuitive sense.
Are the first 5-10 years of life net-negative?
I suppose that depends on his timelines. If he really thinks we're dead in 20-30 years, then the logic of having a kid makes a lot more sense. Kids add immense variety and experience to life that you don't get without them. If you have a median doom target of 6-10 years then I don't see why you'd have a kid. The last thing a kid needs are parents who are constantly freaking out about how the world is ending.
IMO, the kids need stable homes with both parents present and there to care about them and properly pass on their values, and it just seems, to me, like parents who are constantly worried about how we're all dead in ten years might not make the best home for a kid to grow up healthy and adjusted in.
And I suppose I'm assuming that Eliezer has enough self-awareness to realize this and thus, if his timelines were short, he would choose not to.
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
7mo ago
I have. Of the cardio sports I come closest to enjoying, I enjoy swimming the most, but don't have a pool I can use that's within a reasonable range. I'm not a very competitive person, and much prefer personal challenges.
If I had a really nice bike I would consider it, but I don't live in a terribly bike-friendly area.
Templexious
8mo ago
Since we're now so low in the comment chain, no need to spoiler, but: this line of thought is something I had in mind while thinking about my own definition.
Obviously the term changes based on who uses it. If Peter Thiel or Elon Musk call a group of people NPC's, that has different connotations than if a fellow commenter on this forum use the term. "Everyone is the player character in their own story" and all that.
We've had some excellent responses, and most everyone seems to have gravitated toward a similar definition!
At 24 hrs from the time of my post or so depending on how buys I am, I'll post a more full examination of my comment and from where I picked up my definition. Obviously, I had far more time to think about my answer before I made this comment.
My Definition:
Hello Mottizens, long time lurker, first time top-level commenter. I think I understand the rules, if I haven't absorbed them by lurking over the last 9 or so months. As ai x-risk enters the politicosphere, I hope we can consider discussion of the topic as on-topic for the thread.
I've been thinking about the upper echelons of the x-risk bourgeois- in particular, the polyamory. Your Aella, your Eliezer, your MIRI heads, the ouroboric relationships in the community, and watching the social drek that's been demonstrated by following their various Twitter accounts. I've been wondering. Aella is a sex worker, and she is clearly being treated like shit by Eliezer. For a man who believes doom is coming, having a kid seems, at this point, frankly illogical.
With all the money EY has picked up from MIRI etc, I would probably fuck off to some tropical islands, or if EY is such a japanophile, to Japan.
But: Why does Aella tolerate his bullshit on Twitter ?
My theory, therefore, is that Aella has so much dirt on those people that she could singlehandedly doom any prospects of a bunch of the lesswrongian bay area stemcels from seeing the light of day for the next ten years. You simply don't host consentual-non-consent parties without picking up some piles of dirt. Whether they're our redpillers who think rape should be legal, or just lonely rich dudes who just need someone to fuck but don't know how to go to Vegas and get escorts.
You don't host sex parties without eventually picking some really terrible, skeevy shit. And I think she realizes this. And I also think she realizes that these are the kind of people with enough money, that if they wanted her gone, she's gone. As such, it's my belief that Aella is stuck in a hell of her own making. If the bubble pops, things will get nasty.
As such, my theory is that Aella is tolerating Yud, and the other rationalists, because she's scared for her life. If she were to tell EY "no, you're being a creep... and also endangering the entire x-risk movement", (which, as an aside, I don't think he himself believes in, based on his behavior) she's going to get replaced as the sex gatekeeper for the rich, sex-starved stembros. And so, perhaps, her attempt to have a kid is her bid at retiring and moving to fade off into obscurity?
And so, when she (imo, inevitably, some time in the next few years if her hail mary to disappear off the map before her body expires and they no longer want her) explodes, we'll have another article in TIME, or The Guardian or whatever other woke news reporter can get their hands on first. If/when that happens, we can kiss the pretenses of x-risk concern out the window, as the final curtains get pulled.
Thoughts? Holes in logic? Did I assume too much?
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