TwiceHuman
2d ago
Well, life originated on earth about 4 billion years ago. Between that time and now, qualia has slowly come into existence. Emotions, consciousness, subjective taste, ego, and other such things. I also have reasons to believe that individuality and higher levels of consciousness are somewhat recent (say, developed over the past 5000 years). But more generally, what I'm claiming is "In a completely material universe, qualia emerged due to some unknown factors, and now it seems that these factors might be disappearing again".
Why would it outcompete an equivalent setup
It must have, otherwise it wouldn't exist. The reasoning I'm using is the same that Darwin used, survival of the fittest is a tautology in a sense. If consciousness resulted in a lower fitness, I believe it must necessarily have disappeared. Another fun fact we can deduce from this is that suffering is good (useful), and that deeming suffering to be bad (a problem) is useful as well. So, suffering is good but we're meant to think that it's not.
Some more arguments for why qualia might disappear:
What you learn in school is to be less human, less spontaneous, less biased, less subjective. The socialization process is basically destroying parts of yourself until you fit within the mold. The goal of most religions is suppressing parts of yourself (Buddhism takes this idea the furthestm though). The system just wants you to be useful and productive, and you're judged by your utility alone. In society we value fairness, impartiality, reason, level-headedness, stoicism and other behaviour at which robots happen to be perfect because they lack qualia. Most psychiatry and medicine works by numbing qualia. Most psychological defense mechanisms have the goal of numbing qualia. Most people life in constant distraction (escapism) and hate being alone with themselves. Most philosophies are designed around lowering qualia, bringing it towards zero: "This too shall pass", "Nothing really matters". It's all dead-mans morality, minimization of the human experience, a sort of suicide and glorification thereof.
The remaining aspects are collapsing into categories of superstimuli (porn, girlfriend ASMR videos, power-fantasy manga, slice-of-life manga, gambling, spices, reaction videos, fast food, massage, roleplaying, daydreaming) and serve as drugs to satiate or numb a category of human needs.
TwiceHuman
3d ago
Powerful manias happen when that type of person builds up momentum, and the paralysis happens when they cannot build momentum. The "gifted kid burnout" is what happens when somebody takes up more of a challenge than they can handle. The more resistance you overcome, the greater the rush you experience when it is overcome, if you overcome it. Perfectionism is similar, people either make amazing things, or they're destroyed by their own high standards. I think what happens is that such people accidentally condition themselves into inaction. If you deem your own imperfect product to be a failure, then you punish yourself for your own hard work. The higher your standards, the less reward you get from your accomplishments.
Suffering leads to greatness because suffering is the gap between your current state and your goals. But if this gap is too wide, you realize that the current you is insufficient in reaching the goal, so you realize that you "aren't good enough". Most positive emotion felt in life comes from movement towards ones goals, and despair generally comes from the prediction that one will not reach their goal. Often, despair drives one to re-evaluate things, and if one questions reality for too long, it falls apart, and one falls into nihilism. From nihilism, one can build their own, better philosophy out of the rubble, but it's generally a really difficult thing to do.
If Diogenes was a Nietzsche-type, then he was broken early, only to never fully recover. A common trait in nihilistic people is that they find enjoyment in pointing out other peoples illusions, e.g. "love is just chemicals". If he had actually recovered, he'd be more positive and monk-like, or like Jesus or the Buddha. A well-made philosophy is for something good, while poor philosophies rely on something else to be against, they exist only as a negation of something else
TwiceHuman
3d ago
This post is uncomfortably well suited for me. Thanks for sharing it! It ties together a lot of seemingly unrelated things that I've already come across by chance (I noticed years ago doing my depression that the shared reality of a group was more or less the sum of individual interpretations, making social matters collaborative storytelling). The advice is good as well, but it seems difficult for shamans to achieve financial security. Oh well, at least my autism gives me a buff in STEM related tasks
The quoted text in your post is basically all true, except of course for the fact that socialism is a terrible system.
I'll try to be short and axiomatic:
1: Systems become worse with size, meaning felt by the individual is inversely correlated to the size of the structure they exist within (a social being can tell when it's not needed by its environment. This terrifies the social being)
2: Because of laws of statistics, the limit of the micro-scale will result in a macro-scale in which the individual properties of the micro-scale entities don't matter (I don't know the name for this, perhaps asymptotic emergence?)
3: In the far past, emotions didn't exist, life competed in a purely material sense. Emotions (or more generally, qualia) came into existence because they out-competed agents without emotion.
4: It seems we may be creating an environment in which emotions are once again sub-optimal. In fact, a lot of human things are starting to be sub-optimal, and the shortest paths to "success in life" requires destruction of the self ("selling out") and of good taste (morality prunes locally optimal choices if the definition of optimal is purely materialistic)
5: We're trapped in a world in which the incentives threaten to destroy humanity, in the sense that, even if humans exist in the future, they will lack depth and personality. I predict that the standard deviation on various tests and quizzes will shrink as the homogeneity of various things increases.
In short, the problem is not "capitalism", it's the traits/structure of the system that we exist within, like it's size and connectivity. The woke are not wrong when they say that diversity is good, they're wrong when they accelerate the destruction of diversity by mixing together different things.
Technology is only making all this worse, though Ted Kaczynski seems to blame technology for all the problems I listed above.
TwiceHuman
3d ago
AI-generated media is, I think, necessarily generic. Generating proper art is antithetical to how AIs function. People seek novelty, and LLMs learn through repetition, so novelty is precisely what they fail to learn. AIs are also downstream of human experience, and they cannot ever be otherwise, so attempting to solve this problem is like trying to turn hyper-processed foods back into healthy ingredients. An experience is more real than the memory of said experience, and for the same reason, AI generated content is necessarily lacking to anyone with taste (those who can taste the difference between home-made food and microwaved supermarket food)
TwiceHuman
10d ago
I don't think anyone would do more for a stranger than a close friend. But these people might have beliefs like "I generally don't like humans, animals are much better" or "If only we could all become cyborgs so that we could get rid of our human imperfections" or "Humans are a plague on the planet, I'm ashamed for being human myself".
Thoughts like this correlate with the dislike of nationalism, because of the belief that egoism is bad at any scale (speaking positively about the self, or ones own group is perceived as being immoral because it implies that other groups are inferior). These people also feel inferior, which is why they feel great pity for other groups that they perceive as inferior. These people want an ideal world, and think that if we aren't living in one, it must be because somebody is mean (and not because life is hard), so another trait in leftism is naivety (the exact same kind which is found in communism!).
Of course, prioritizing friends over non-friends is the same sort of bias as nationalism, and even considering leftism superior to right-wing beliefs is not different from thinking that one culture or race is superior to another. Leftists always speak about how bad white people are, even white leftists, but somehow they feel superior for noticing that they're not superior. This feels similar to when people compete in who can be the most humble, and other virtue signaling. It feels illogical, but that's likely because the goal isn't logic consistency, but things like:
1: Calming ones conscience. 2: Feeling good about oneself. 3: Defending against criticism from other people. 4: It allows for people of mediocre and uneventful lives to feel like they're fighting for something important.
Leftism can also be compared to some aspects of Christianity, especially the strongly feminine parts. Even more interestingly, the subversion of Christianity can be compared with the subversive nature of leftism, as described by Yuri Bezmenov.
TwiceHuman
11d ago
You're talking about this right? I think most people here are familiar with it. There's even more interesting things, like this
If you want to know my current model, it's that the leftist is a psychological type. There's more of them in major cities, so I think the unabomber was right to call them "oversocialized" (cities have more people, so more interactions between people)
TwiceHuman
13d ago
That's a good point. "Dangerous" is meaningless unless it's a strong and direct effect. Perhaps "calls for something which is against my human rights". This has to actually be true, it's not enough to argue "It's an attack of my person that you don't give me special rights which suit my uniqueness".
How people interpret dangers is strongly influenced by propaganda, so if you convince group X that group Y is out to get them, group X will start attacking group Y in perceived (but non-existent) self-defense. I feel that this second part, the interpretation, is where most conflict happen. Actual value disagreements seem minor. Perhaps the value hierarchy (order of priority) is different, though.
TwiceHuman
13d ago
I think we're overcomplicating things (not refering to you, but to society). All preferences align as you approach the source from which they originate. For instance, if the left says "Trump is violent" and the right says "Left-wing activists are violent", then both sides agree that "violence is undesirable". Of course, you see a lot of left-wingers advocate for violence, and a lot of right-wingers indirectly doing the same: "The tree of liberty...". Here, the agreement is "Violence might be necessary in self-defense" and "Violence is an acceptable means against tyranny".
The actual conflict is whether or not Trump is tyrannical, and whether or not Charlie Kirk's rhetoric is dangerous (an attack which should be defended against). Another comment of yours mention pedophilia, but the real disgreements are things like "Is teaching children about anal sex education, or is it grooming?" and "Is a 20-year-old male dating a 17-year-old woman natural and innocent, or is it predatory?", for we agree that grooming and predation are immoral.
I offer this perspective because it keeps me clearsighted (prevents me from drowning in complexity) and because any conclusions generalize to all similar issues.
The internet does not have to mean that, which is why the old internet did not mean that. As with the disappearance of borders, nationalism, "gatekeeping", male-only spaces, churches, etc. the problem is the modern mindset that everything should be interconnected. If you model the world as a big graph, and calculate the connectivity of said graph and call it X, then you will realize that different values of X leads to different mechanics, and that large values of X create problems that smaller values of X do not. The idea that more information is better, is actually wrong, and intellectual circles have yet to realize this. All of this is probably downstream of the facts that information can be sold, and that more information makes automation easier.
The simple solution is both separating things, and considering things as seperated. The first is achieved by decentralization (and you've already realized this yourself), and the latter is achived by getting rid of pathological associative thinking (if somebody calls you an evil nazi because you support borders, they're making the association borders -> nationalism -> nazi germany -> evil). Mental maturity is broadly speaking the complete opposite. For instance, if your comment makes me angry, then this is an issue with myself rather than with you.
People who fight evil will create mental associative knots, and call it "Them", "(((them)))", "sin", "nazism", "communism", etc. and ruthlessly attack everything within greater and greater distances. For instance, somebody might attack anime because "anime -> school-girl characters -> pedophilia -> child abuse -> evil".
The idea that guns kills people, and that Google should be punished for indexing illegal websites, are both failures of proper separation, structually and psychologically. This cognitive error is thus responsible for censorship, people being forced to take sides in issues that they aren't interested in, and things like corruption (for corruption is when two entites which cannot benefit themselves engage in an agreement to benefit eachother, thus bypassing a defensive structural design).
An alternative method still possible today is embedding secrecy and separation inside a connected, judgemental structure. This requires encryption between structures such that the shared structure they exist within cannot read the message (Encryption stops the flow of information in some directions, so it separates). So like how an app can have E2E encrypted messages that even the app cannot access, you could make a website that your host of choice cannot access. This will go away if encryption is made illegal, or if one is forced to give the keys to the authorities.
You cannot 'win' unless you own the outer layer. If you have full access over your computer, then you can stop an app inside it from spying on you. If the government have full access over your computer, then it doesn't matter how secure the apps you use are, they can simply look at the screen or read the keyboard.
You also cannot have your cake an eat it too. If you have privacy, then criminals will have it as well. It must apply to both the very best people and the very worst. It's completely binary, you either have 100% privacy or 0% privacy.
TwiceHuman
14d ago
Game theory problems only emerge at scale. Smaller communities don't suffer from them nearly as much for this reason. I believe in the capability of exceptional individuals, humanity has advanced thanks to great people/'giants', the mediocre masses add very little value.
I also happen to have reverse engineered some of these dynamics, and probably better than 99% of researchers, for I have solutions that I don't see anyone else talk about directly. Granted, Jordan Peterson wrote a book warning about excessive order, but I don't think he realizes that he's mathematically correct in warning against that. And do you know that the definition we use for "rational agent" is one which always seeks its own advantage? If our ideal for how one ought to think is completely void of good taste (like that definition is), then we will run into problems which didn't exist in the past because good taste used to protect against it.
How do you get somebody to do 1000$ worth of labour, without paying them, and without coercion? It seems impossible mathematically, and yet, my grandma has sometimes done this, just because she enjoys helping people. By making people more intelligent, but less human, less things become possible. General intelligence might conflict with instincts, as learning logical thinking is all about suppressing your natural biases, instincts, emotions, etc.
Accurate world models aren't bad per se, but they're not sufficient. Being completely objective also puts you at a high risk of becoming a nihilist.
Of course our coordination is getting worse. We're also becoming more lonely despite being "more connected" than ever. The reasons are more obvious the less educated one is.
TwiceHuman
14d ago
Good thing you bring up those two terms, they're making the difference. I'm saying that the internet is privately owned, and that the fact that real life isn't, is the main reason we have any sort of freedom at all. The rest of the difference is purely mentality. It doesn't feel weird for people to say "We shouldn't allow people on the sex offender registry on our website", and yet, you don't hear of sex offenders being banned from walmart, or blacklisted from electricity companies, and for some reason, this doesn't lead to either company being accused of aiding sex offenders. If we ran the real world like we ran the internet, then you could easily kill people just by making them unpopular. They'd be unable to buy food, to drink water, to find a place to sleep, to get a car, etc, with the argument that anyone who provides a service to criminals are criminals as well. Which is why that idea is insane.
I recall reading that a company should either act like a platform or a service, rather than try to enjoy the advantages of both but admittedly not in dept.
TwiceHuman
14d ago
But that's because they're being a nuisance. If they spoke about the wonders of alcohol, they'd be removed all the same, so they're not kicked out for being anti-alcohol. I guess we can define "freedom of speech" as unbiased moderation, in short, it's "neutrality". So even with freedom of speech, spam is not allowed, but you can advocate in favor of any ideology as long as you do it in the proper manner.
Another important thing to note is that rights are limited when and only when they conflict with another persons rights. There's a hiarchy of importance, so certain rights overwrite others in certain contexts. This makes it appear as if precise definitions aren't possible with human-related problems like rights, but I still think it is
TwiceHuman
14d ago
Granted, how you're speaking here is how I speak to myself internally, and I consider that voice to be myself when I identify with the part of me responsible for rational thought (which I don't do much anymore. I should be more grounded in my body and less in my head). I might have misinterpreted you, or perhaps the brutal honesty you have with yourself comes across as holding others to brutal standards as well. I have multiple "real selves" so I can understand you more than average people can.
I no longer dislike that normies communicate not for the sake of information transfer, but for the sake of social coherence and good-will. What I dislike is the sort of evil which stems from weakness and fragile minds (being triggered, jealousy, the crabs-in-a-bucket mentality, and various other herd morality).
It appears that you can't have it both ways?
What I disliked was the dishonesty, and the... schadenfreude perhaps? which pretended to be quality. This is a flaw in people, and not in the site itself, which is why it's not solvable by the site. But I do think that taste and correctness are in conflict. Do you know this article? Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans. It's wrong. Good taste cannot co-exist with open information. You cannot be human and do science simultaneously (unless you can approach science as "serious play" like John Conway could. Probably easier with math than with politics). But "the mask" is not an issue when it exists purely for aesthetical reasons (i.e. for the sake of beauty), under such circumstances it becomes [manners] and even [art], rather than [manipulation] and [fakeness].
But while you cannot have both openness and taste, can have free, honest communication without hostility through sportsmanship. You know how boxers can be enemies doing fights, but friends outside of it? This idea allows us to "fight as friends", and it's what fragile minds lack. Negative emotions like anger do not need a target. You can simply acknowledge "That makes me incredibly angry", without making the other person responsible. You could even give in to the emotion without blaming the other person for feeling it, and without becoming malicious. A lot of things which are logically impossible happen to be psychologically possible, so you might be throwing away advantages through e.g. enforcing internal logical consistency. Grammar and logic are restrictive, they're self-imposed limitations.
Also, the old internet is different both in structure and in its inhabitants. Communities with intellectuals and freedom of speech are something like 90% male with an average age of about 35 (pure guesswork). We used to have freedom in spaces with average ages of 14 or 15. The mentality of teenagers is entirely different, which is why the modern internet is unable to replicate the atmosphere of the past. Granted, I'm speaking about 2005-2012, if you go further back, the ratio of older men goes up once again.
TwiceHuman
14d ago
The difference between talking outside and online, is that real spaces aren't moderated or owner by other people. The supermarket cannot stop other people from hearing your voice, your local park cannot make you invisible to other people. Your destribution is only hindered by the laws of physics. Imagine if, in real life, you were told "You aren't entitled to use the sidewalk", or "If nobody lets you use your local bridge, maybe you should reflect on your behaviour", or perhaps "Your local water company can refuse to sell you water if your political views do not align with theirs". This is the important difference, which it feels like you're brushing over or not noticing
TwiceHuman
15d ago
In London, random people will decide if you're worth listening to or not. On social media sites, random people will never get to decide if the algorithm simply blacklists things containing words which align with specific ideologies. The algorithm doesn't even know who I am, nor has the algorithm learned that people do not want to hear what I'm saying, it's simply manually coded to prevent people from talking about certain ideas, even between people who both like said idea.
The mechanism you're describing is an algorithm which favors the content that people enjoy the most, and filters away the content that people enjoy this least, but this is not how social media algorithms work. If a website implements a neutral algorithm, and simply step back and let things take care of themselves, then they'll get in big trouble. Maybe porn will be on the frontpage, maybe one of Hitlers speeches will blow up because it's interesting, maybe bots will successfully game it, whatever. Every algorithm which exists today is carefully engineered to do specific things, and it's not true that your online following is a function of the ratio of people who want to associate with you and hear your ideas. They manually "correct" it every time content that the owners don't like become popular. I'd not dislike such an algorithm much, as it would technically be fair for all users
TwiceHuman
15d ago
That's a good sign! The correct grammar comes across a bit robotic though. It also comes across as professional, but I imagine communicating warmth through such correct language is difficult?
Now that you mention it, the reflection was started by the quality contribution about holocaust denial. I think it was a bit of a condescending and angry reply, and I imagine that people upvoted it because of that. I don't think it was written in a way which would sway anyone on the fence about the issue. I felt like I was on Reddit for a second. But I wasn't really criticizing themotte as much as making an observation about the modern internet. Even if there was no outside pressure forcing TM to change, some users would leave and others would arrive, and the site would change over time as a result. My comment isn't really actionable in any sense, I was mostly venting. I was also fishing for recommendations of obscure writing by intelligent but somewhat crazy people like this.
TwiceHuman
15d ago
Isn't this limitation a part of the map rather than part of the territory? Language is limited, logic is limited, math is limited, etc, but reality doesn't particularly care about the mental jails which we create. I disagree with your earlier comment that understanding aspects of the world in depth is impossible, but I do believe that knowledge alone is insufficient. A condition you might accept for "understanding aspects of the world" is being able to predict the future, and some great people of the past have made eerily good predictions (I believe Tesla predicted phones and computer monitors, and Nietzsche predicted communism and its death toll. Less impressive works are ones like 1984, but that still requires a good intuition to notice an approaching problem before others). Maybe it seems like a nitpick, but my claim is "0.01% of people have a solid understanding of some aspect of the world", and with how statistics work, the vast majority of people who claim to have these abilities are wrong.
I hope you get to experience something which breaks your models of what's possible. It's a refreshing experience and a great blow to limiting beliefs
TwiceHuman
15d ago
I think you're missing the point. If you wanted to talk to your mother, would I be okay with deciding what you were allowed to say? Would Google? The government? As far as I'm concerned, nobody has the right to hinder communication between anyone else. The fact that Google can even read my emails is already a disaster, and I'm quite sure reading your physical mail is highly illegal, and that the reasons behind this decision aren't invalid for digital mails.
The one who listens has as much freedom as the one who speaks
This sounds like the freedom of association? I like that concept. What I dislike is when companies try to decide who I can associate with, as well as who can associate with me.
The internet didn't work like this before the fallacy of association began. The form of the fallacy is "If illegal content ends up on Google, Google is guilty" or "If a person writes a slur in your game chat, your game is guilty", "If you're friends with a sexist, you're likely a sexist yourself", etc. You might have heard other versions of it, like "Roblox is guilty because pedophiles use it" and "Guns should be illegal because criminals use them". The idea is sometimes mocked as "Hitler drank water once, therefore you're a nazi for enjoying water". I believe that a large chunk of all conflict in the world, and the biggest reason that ideological bubbles have become such a problem, is this very fallacy.
TwiceHuman
15d ago
The shopping mall analogy turned out to be a poor choice on my end, I meant the feeling of the space itself, not any of its functions. A bar, a mall, an airport, a school.. They all feel public, in a way that your bedroom, or a house in the forest 50 miles from any other civilization does not.
Neither problem can be helped, I think. Some people (high IQ non-conformists) are 10 times less common today than they were in the past, so asking for a community with a higher concentration of them than this is a rather unrealistic demand. Also, this website cannot improve much further than this, because the surrounding world wouldn't allow it to be much more based than it is already. As the world gets more connected, the difference between everything decreases, on every scale (cultures, countries, websites, people, ideas, genes, you name it), and then it faces "pressure" from the outside to the extent that it is different. So if your surroundings degrade, you degrade as well. Fighting this is like keeping your house cold in the middle of the summer, or trying to keep a child from learning any swear words.
What I seek may become possible if/when web3 becomes a thing
TwiceHuman
15d ago
I don't see a big difference in being hostile to myself, and others being hostile to me. Self-censorship happens because the brain doesn't consider certain actions to be safe, and as long as you cannot convince it otherwise (get rid of the belief), you won't be able to do said behaviour without an altered state of mind. If you simulated a universe with just a single human being in it, I don't think concepts like shame, embarassment, judgement, "being cringe", prosecution, etc would exist.
And even if you can talk about anything, can you be yourself? Can you write emojis like "^.^" without feeling extremely uncomfortable?
I don't want to sound ungrateful that this space exists, but it has nothing on the old internet. You could probably talk about both of these subjects on the Gaia Online of 2010 and people would just think you were silly. I don't know about the old Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel, but likely those too. In the past, you could only get banned by breaking the rules. If you didn't break any rules, basically anything went, even if everyone hated you. This changed around 2011 or so. This is likely why subreddits like "cute dead children" existed until around that time.
Calling out jews or wanting to be a woman is acceptable to maybe 10-20% of the population, that's a lot. That you think either of these are weird seems to prove my point. And I agree with Arjin below, who knows how many bits of identifiable information exists in the typos that I consistently make? Most freedom enjoyed in the modern society is freedom through obscurity
TwiceHuman
15d ago
I once asked which internet community had the most intelligent people, and that's when I was recommended this site.
I don't want to be a parasite on the community, but in order to engage with a comment, I feel like I have to understand most of it, but most comments speak of specifics that I have never heard of before (and which doesn't interest me). And I'd feel bad responding to a long text, just to discuss a minor part of it, as that's just nitpicking or directing the conversation towards what interests me but which may not interest the other person.
As for your link, the reason communities don't "feel like home" to most people is because they feel like public spaces instead. It does not feel outside the panopticon, it doesn't feel like a place where one can take off their 'mask'. For this feeling to go away, every layer of the structure will have to be unrelated to something that I consider hostile to myself, which means that this website and every layer that it's contained within (the host, for instance) will have to forgive me for being an imperfect human, not just now but until it ceases to exist. It's hard to say if the internet changed, or if I did (oversocialization?), but 99% of websites feel as homely as a public shopping mall to me. Now, I don't know if this feeling is correct, but I do know that it correlates with age, so it's probably socially conditioned
TwiceHuman
15d ago
This months takes feel a little weak to me, maybe it's because I'm starting to outgrow this place. The same happened at LW, my first impressions of that site were good, but then I gradually became able to see flaws in peoples arguments, and now most of the posts on there are simply annoying to read, and none of them blow me away or make me feel like I'm not qualified to read them (a feeling which I happen to enjoy, and actively seek out). My method of evaluation is rather non-standard. I consider a unique and insightful take to be superior to a mediocre, but relevant take. I suppose I also find it frustrating to see people debate a X-year-old issue, with none of the arguments being any better than they were X years ago, especially for large X on issues that I consider "solved".
Some of the takes on here are also completely obvious to a lot of 'regular' people, or they're things which used to be common knowledge, but now manages to be uncommon knowledge, especially in educated circles. Some people also advocate for traditional ideas, but do so in a way which has integrated a modern perspective. As a fictional example: If somebody were to say "Borders are an extreme, but necessarily solution" then they'd be refusing the modern position of open borders, while buying into the ridiculus, modern idea that borders are something which needs to be defended in the first place, rather than something obviously necessary. As you fight against bad ideas, you shouldn't also integrate them into your own worldview. You shouldn't buy into a wrong context even if you can refute some ideas from within it. Good takes on general issues are timeless, so a forum which is too strongly colored by the current year will have takes which are only useful within the context which prompted them (causing poor generalizability), they'd be purely reactive. It also creates the fear that moderators would punish you for writing something outside of the overton window, which would be considered completely inoffensive in some other culture and/or some other century.
Most things that frustrate me are very minor, but still impactful, like the idea that loneliness and a lack of sex are the same thing, as if seeing a prostitute would make you less lonely. This very framing is pathological. (I realize it might just have been a simplification though)
Not that all takes are mediocre, a few are quite good (and I'm completely spoiled by having internet access, so I have very high standards), and the only way I can describe it is that reading them feels completely different from the average comment, they're refreshing to read (unlike my own comment. I'm not a good writer and the arrogant tone is probably off putting as well)
TwiceHuman
16d ago
If social media algorithms are made to filter certain ideas, you have censorship. And that's not how the algorithms are meant to be used in the first place. Algorithms are supposed to personalize your feed so that content you're interested in is shown to you. The argument you're using here is often used to promote censorship, and it's often combined with the argument "Freedom of speech is only a protection against government censorship", and here I'd say the same thing as OP - that it's a poisoned version of the actual concept, and poorly thought out.
Of course, this leaves some ambiguity in the definition of free speech, but I think those can be fixed if we borrow the concept of positive vs negative rights
It can be that, but it can also be the complete opposite. For example, I trust myself to not engage in immoral behaviour, therefore I do not walk on egg-shells around moral subjects (this scares the shit out of some people, though)
Homosexuals might find it easier to joke about how gay they are, but as will straight people who have overcome any fear of being thought of as gay, because they know for sure that they're not. As with the Horse Shoe Theory, the correlation is curved.
A lot of people with dark humor have been victims of the things that they joke about, by the way. I find it quite distasteful when people who haven't experienced such things accuse them of being insensitive, which is often what happens. Too much morality is performative, and I find this whole situation to be another instance of people point fingers at others in order to feel morally superior and score virtue signaling points, or at the very least it's a reaction prompted by fear (rather than goodwill, taste, actual concern, etc)
You could argue that some jokes are bad taste, but I think this depends on a lot of factors, and that most of them are hard to judge from an outside perspective. Once you know a person well, you will be able to tell their real attitude towards things that they joke about, and the mindset which prompted the joke.
Edit: Extra thing of note: If somebody is a bad person, it's better for everyone if they show it than to hide it. For this reason, I see no point in punishing speech even if it's vile.
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