aaa
5mo ago
25 years puts us in 1999 when internet porn was already widely available. Make that 20 and people even have broadband and can watch videos too. I don't know what you think the heyday of porn is, pornhub? They didn't invent internet pornography, there were plenty of before then. But really, mindgeek was founded almost exactly 20 years ago. Time flies.
aaa
8mo ago
If you were in the marketing department at AB and someone said “hey, why not send a one-time promotional can to this influencer that she’ll only market to her (highly woke) progressive following and that our core audience will never even hear about?” what would you say to convince them of how badly things would go?
"He doesn't have a highly woke following he's a lolcow, hate-watched by a following of alogs. Just read the comments on youtube and then imagine what they would write if this topic wasn't heavily censored. This marketing campaign will only be seen by TERFs and chuds, the best you can hope from it is that it will have zero impact."
"What's an alog?"
But really, I think they knew what they were doing. If you spend enough time on the app formerly known as twitter you start developing a reactive mind, you do/say/think things just to maximally own the libs/chuds. Somebody in marketing just thought "what can I do in my line of work to own the chuds today? I know they seem to hate this Dylan Mulvaney person, I'll sponsor them".
aaa
1yr ago
It's maddening that all statistics about this are self reported. We're talking about a demographics that takes prescription drugs, we should be able to know the exact number within a small margin of error.
aaa
1yr ago
The arian heresy is the most common non-mainstream christian belief. And for good reasons: many early christians didn't believe it, it's based on the flimsiest of biblical interpretation, it's basically incompatible with some metaphysical understandings of god (unmoved mover etc) and just plain bizarre.
I wonder if it didn't simply win because it's a civilizational tier shit test: getting people to hold absurd beliefs is a good way to insure that they are politically loyal.
aaa
1yr ago
Footbinding, as a universally engaged in practice among the Chinese upper class for hundreds of years basically the entirety of my point, in that it represents a qualitative deviation from anything the Europeans ever did; in that it represents extreme entirely unprovoked cruelty carried out personally again close innocent kin
Ah, cruelty carried out on the innocent. My favorite topic. There was the castration of church choir boys, that went on for a couple hundred years. And circumcision of infants, americans still do it. People in sicily sold their children into slavery to miners as late as the turn of the century (the last one, not this one). Corporal punishment in school was common in some places until the 70s, what's 7*6? I don't know. Hands slapped with a wood stick.
The dog issue is only relevant in that they are still up to it - today. I'm fully aware that both European and non-european civilizations have been extremely cruel to animals in the past. Find me evidence of Brits or Germans cooking dogs alive when they had similar material conditions to modern China (beginning of 1900s) and you'll have a strong point.
China today is not comparable to any place in europe in the last century. Some place are very rich but some places are extremely poor. How many places in europe can you find where people resort to eating rats? None, but it still happens in china.
That said, depending on how you feel about horses, I may have bad news for you.
aaa
1yr ago
Haven't read the book, however a couple of notes on your summary:
Seeing as there is not a better place for it, I thought I’d wrap up by going over what Joyce calls “gender-identity ideology” (GII). This is how trans people are encouraged to think and rationalize who and/or what they are
About this The Socio-Medical Construction of Transexualism (1982, Billings and Urban) is interesting:
Since the reputable clinics treated only "textbook" cases of transsexualism, patients desiring surgery, for whatever personal reasons, had no other recourse but to meet this evaluation standard. The construction of an appropriate biography became necessary. Physicians reinforced this demand by rewarding compliance with surgery and punishing honesty with an unfavorable evaluation. The result was a social process we call "the con." An elaborate and well-informed patient grape-vine, indirectly facilitated by the Erikson Educational Foundation's patient services, conveyed tips on each clinic's evaluative criteria and on "passing":
Unlike the old medical saw that claims the last time you see a textbook case of anything is when you close the textbook, we began to see patients that appeared to be nearly identical - both from a subjective and historical point of view. (....)
Soon it became conspicuously and disturbingly apparent that far too many patients presented a pat, almost rehearsed history, and seemingly were well versed in precisely what they should or should not say or reveal. Only later did we learn that there did and does exist a very effective grape-vine (Fisk, 1973:8).
In many instances, the con involved outright deception. For example, a physician warned the Fifth International Gender Dysphoria Symposium in 1977 to watch out for a male-to-female post-operative transsexual posing as the mother of young, male candidates in order to corrorborate their early socialization accounts of ambivalent gender cues and over-mothering. More often, the process was less direct. Fisk (1973:9) acknowledges "the phenomenon of retrospectively 'amending' one's subjective history. Here, the patient quite subtly alters, shades, rationalizes, denies, represses, forgets, etc., in a compelling rush to embrace the diagnosis of transsexualism."
Regarding the Matrix, it's interpretation as an allegorit for transgenderism is almost certainly a retcon. Judging from the recent Matrix Revolutions it even seems that likely only Lilly embraced this retcon.
It doesn't even make much sense within the context of the movie, it only works if you don't think about the details at all. What is your "real" gender, the one of the body in the pod, that you were born with, or the one expressed by your mind, inside the simulation? No. The Matrix was a kung-fu movie foremost, it had a basic gnostic framework and its main theme is the existence of free will.
As for dualism, describing it like this:
This view is especially tempting in the modern age, because most of us understand the analogy of a computer: a piece of hardware upon which any software might run. If operating systems are gender, then you can run Linux and Windows and Mac on the same machine without issue or even anyone complaining.
is extermely reductive. Dualism has a long history in western thought and is, for the most part, entwined with christian thought, which requires it for its theological views on afterlife. This is actually one of several points where its hard to reconcile woke-thought with the metaphisical materialst worldview (= the new athists).
aaa
1yr ago
This significantly downgrades the probability that it was a honest mistake the first time. I'm still going to wait for more information before believing that it's a fetish, instead of some other retarded motivation. We don't even know if this one belonged to a woman, let alone looked like it belonged to a woman.
(if you want to steal bags you do it at bars and restaurants in tourist areas, like all other thiefs, not in an airport)
aaa
5mo ago
And in your opinion something nobody fully understands is less of a shit test than believing in perpetual virginity?
aaa
5mo ago
Did you know that radio transmitters can be damaged by operating them without an antenna?
But in this case the brain would be the receiver antenna. I mean, this is all an hypothetical so you can always make up an excuse how a damage on one end (physical) would propagate to the other end (ghost world?), none of this could disprove it but also none of what we've discovered in neurology so far reinforces the existence of an immaterial mind.
aaa
8mo ago
Like the theory that the ADL is funding neo-nazis. Why would they do anything like that?
I don't think they actually are, but there is a rational reason to do it: neo nazis are a safe enemy, no one likes them and they don't stand a chance to ever accomplish anything meaningful.
On the other hand progressive antisemitism is dangerous because it doesn't have all the negative associations that nazis have, it has an academic foundation and is part of an hegemonic ideology.
If you consider it, progressive antisemitism makes a lot of sense, jews are white passing, they are (greatly) overrepresented in positions of power and in the israel/palestine they are on the wrong side of the oppressor/oppressed and colonizer/colonized dichotomies (a pro-palestine position is common in the academic left).
So why isn't antisemitism on the left more common? Because nazis exist, so it would make sense for the ADL to want the nazis to continue existing.
aaa
10mo ago
Let's say that all that argumentation fails. There still seem to be reasons that it might be a sensible thing to adhere to, even if you think it's relatively unlikely. Pascal's wager is formidable, for one.
Pascal's wager is terrible because infinite rewards break game theory.
Suppose I ask you to give me $10 and in exchange I will reward you with $10000. Should you take this wager? To answer this question you could estimate the probability p that I'm telling the truth and calculate the expected value of the wager: 10000p - 10(1-p). If it is positive you should pay, if it isn't you shouldn't. It's unlikely that you will be able to prove that p=0 but it also doesn't matter, as long as you estimate it to be low enough that all you need to know.
But suppose I promise you an infinite reward for your $10. The condition is now ∞p - 10(1-p) > 0 which is always true if p > 0. So, as long as you can't call me a liar certainly you have to enter the wager. What's worse this is independent of the entry price. As long as I ask for a finite price, no matter how large, you have to pay it.
What does this mean? Either we should reject all wagers that involve infinite rewards (because otherwise we would have to take all of them) or, if we choose not to, we are lucky that there are multiple incompatible religion. Because taking one religion's wager means rejecting many other and some of the other will have infinite punishments for rejecting them all of the wagers are undecidable and we are free to choose whichever we want or reject all of them.
aaa
10mo ago
You lose a lot of the persuasive power of the argument if you admit that there are things (Jesus Christ) that appear to be moving but do not in fact count as "moving" for the argument. The observation that there are some things that move falls away, as far as I am concerned everything could be like Jesus and actually be motionless.
The problem with those biblical quotes is that there is a colloquial meaning to change and a philosophical one, cosmological arguments only work with the latter but those quotes in context point to the former.
aaa
11mo ago
Looks good. A cursory look around on google maps says that it fits with the surrounding esthetics. What would you build if you had the money of Bill Gates? I've never understood people that like neoclassical buildings in the US, to me they all look phoney, poseur, out of place, lacking in originality.
aaa
1yr ago
The supernatural is that which humans are incapable of explaining with reason and science
Fair enough but that would mean that anything that has a natural theology isn't a religion, for example Heaven's Gate, Scientology and Catholicism.
What do you think is the difference between ideology and religion?
It's probably just a difference in intensity rather than in quality.
aaa
1yr ago
Gluten sensitivity is characterized by a testable and obvious change
I've met a few people that claim to have gluten allergy and consume a gluten free diet (which they claim makes them feel better) but never were tested for it. It could be that a significant percentage of gluten allergies are psychosomatic.
Herniated discs, however, seem indefensible to me. I've never met anyone that claimed to have a herniated disc on a hunch.
aaa
1yr ago
I think it's because Dylan Mulvaney is famous for this https://youtube.com/watch?v=EQ-yzbzqH4U and nobody finds him to be an appealing icon.
aaa
1yr ago
Schooling is part of the problem but really this isn't monocausal. If you want the monocausal explanation then it's "children cost too much", people retort that economic incentives don't work, so it can't be an economic problem but they just don't understand the sheer magnitude of the problem. In a preindustrial society, the kind of society with high birth rates, children are a source of wealth: you can put them to work around the house and in the field as young as 5 years old, it's basically free labor.
In our contemporary, industrialized, societies everything conspires to make children expensive: you don't live around an extended family that can help with child care, women's time is more valuable than ever, housing is expensive, putting them to work is prohibited by the law, not having children is easier than ever, culture doesn't value childrearing and, yes, the problem with education means both that the fertility window is smaller and that raising a child is more expensive.
There are two ways to solve this problem, either make children cheap again or just pay for their current cost. I don't think making children cheap is even remotely possible at this point. Half of the factors at play in making them expensive are huge coordination problems (you can't individually opt out of education, everyone else has to) and the other half are deeply unpopular positions that noone will seriously advocate for and stand no chance of ever gaining any approval, like "women should be property", "you must never leave your parent's home" and "we should allow a certain amount of child slavery to exist".
Economic incentives would probably work, since the problem is mostly economic, but you have to essentially pay for it as much as you do for any other white collar job. It would cost a lot of money, which is why it isn't happening and the problem will not be solved.
aaa
1yr ago
we know what happens when you have multiple generations of brother-sister incest, and it's not pretty
The idea that extreme inbreeding will invariably produce horrible deformities is a myth. The island of Pingelap was repopulated starting from a population bottleneck of 20, most of which belonged to the royal family. Despite this, and despite the fact that the population does suffer from a rare genetic disorder (achromatopsia) they look normal.
aaa
1yr ago
Like Borges says in his book about buddhism "the conversion of a congolese negro to the faith of Jesus Christ is really the conversion of the faith of Jesus Christ to a congolese negro". People are just going to do whatever they want, I even see it with american online catholics: why are you doing lent and reading the bible? Why aren't you worshipping your local saint/icon of mary?
aaa
1yr ago
I was reading Ratzinger last book a couple of months ago and, apparently, the prevaling mainstream opinion in the vatican is that they do not have infallibility on matters of moral theology, so it probably won't be ex cathedra.
aaa
1yr ago
ChatGPT sucks at being a reference for anything because it makes things up constantly. Ask for a recommendation, get a fake book. If someone could threaten Google with ChatGPT they could threaten them with a basic bitch search engine.
They can't, no one can make a search engine better than google because the internet is too shitfilled to get a good quality signal out of it, the only way to rank query results is to get feedback from search engine users and only google has users.
The real ChatGPT threat to Google is that you can use it to create gigantic mountains of plausible looking spam to run ads on. Think content farms, but fully automated: millions and millions of genuine looking wordpress websites filled with plausible looking nonsense answering every possible question a user can possibly have. Millions of fake reviewes for everything both positive and negative all written by language models.
The quality of google results will crater even further than it already has and users will resort to asking questions to other users directly that they know, through extensive interaction, to be humans.
aaa
1yr ago
Has anyone else tested it with things you're knowledgeable about and have any judgements of its usefulness?
There's this thing called advent of code (AoC) going on right now, it's a yearly speed programming challenge. Each day of december, between the 1st and the 25th a new problem is unlocked at midnight NY time. People tried to use chatgpt, as well as more specialized programming language models to participate. ChatGPT started to struggle on day 3, the specialized models failed on day 5. The first week is all very simple problems with long detailed explanations and all you have to do is essentially follow the instructions in the explanation to solve the problem.
Then there's this interaction https://twitter.com/YossiKreinin/status/1600806007911120898, where chatgpt doesn't know what it means for a word to end in i.
Then there's this interaction I had about timezones:
Me: what timezone is 3 hours after new york timezone?
ChatGPT: New York is in the Eastern Time Zone (ET) in the United States. The time in this time zone is currently 3 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-3), so a time zone that is 3 hours ahead of Eastern Time would be UTC+0, or Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). This is the time zone that is used as a reference for all other time zones around the world.
Me: what time zone is new york?
ChatGPT: New York is in the Eastern Time Zone (ET) in the United States. The Eastern Time Zone is 3 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-3), so the local time in New York is determined by subtracting 3 hours from the current UTC time. For example, if the current UTC time is 14:00, the local time in New York would be 11:00.
Me: what time zone is rio de janeiro?
ChatGPT: Rio de Janeiro is in the Brazil Time Zone (BRT), which is 3 hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC+3). This means that when it is 12:00 PM in New York (Eastern Time), it is 3:00 PM in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil Time).
Me: what time zone is nuuk?
ChatGPT: Nuuk is the capital city of Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark. Greenland is in the Western Greenland Time Zone (WGT), which is 3 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-3). This means that when it is 12:00 PM in New York (Eastern Time), it is 9:00 AM in Nuuk (Western Greenland Time).
Me: are nuuk and new york in the same time zone?
ChatGPT: No, Nuuk and New York are not in the same time zone. Nuuk is in the Western Greenland Time Zone (WGT), which is 3 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-3). New York is in the Eastern Time Zone (ET), which is 3 hours behind UTC as well. However, since the two time zones have the same UTC offset, the local time in Nuuk and New York will be the same whenever it is 12:00 PM UTC.
Me: if it's 3pm in new york which time is it in nuuk?
ChatGPT: As I mentioned earlier, Nuuk is in the Western Greenland Time Zone (WGT), which is 3 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-3). Since New York is in the Eastern Time Zone (ET), which is also 3 hours behind UTC, the local time in both places will be the same whenever it is 12:00 PM UTC. However, if it is currently 3:00 PM in New York, then the local time in Nuuk would be 6:00 AM, since New York is 3 hours ahead of Nuuk.
Me: how can it be that new york and nuuk are in the same time zone but new york is also 3 hours ahead of nuuk?
ChatGPT: Although New York and Nuuk are both in time zones that are 3 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-3), they are not in the same time zone. New York is in the Eastern Time Zone (ET), while Nuuk is in the Western Greenland Time Zone (WGT). The difference between the two time zones is the result of the fact that time zones are based on the local time at a specific location, and not on the difference between the time zone and UTC.
Me: can you give me an example of time zones that have the same difference from UTC but sometimes have a local time difference greater than 2 hours?
ChatGPT: Yes, there are many examples of time zones that have the same difference from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) but have a local time difference of more than 2 hours. For example, the time zone in the United Kingdom is GMT (UTC+0), and the time zone in Brazil is BRT (UTC+3). Despite the fact that both time zones are 3 hours ahead of UTC, the local time in Brazil is always 2 hours ahead of the local time in the UK, because the UK is on Greenwich Mean Time, which is the time zone used as a reference for all other time zones.
What's interesting to me about chatgpt is that it may help elucidate what it means to be intelligent by being a close enough imitation that is nonetheless completely unintelligent.
aaa
1yr ago
So far Twitter doesn't seem to have had any critical technical failures despite sacking 2/3rds of its staffing
Regarding this specifically, I think it's incredibly funny how many of the fired employees claimed this. I understand when it's a journalist thinking websites are like some kind of mechanical clock and if there is no one there to crank it every moring it will stop. It's incredible that engineers would say "yep, the system we built is such a massive pile of shit that the moment we turn away it will fall over, shatter in a billion small pieces and no one will be able to even restart it".
A truly amazing endorsement of your own work. Much like walking around with a t-shirt that says "I have a small penis", even if it's true it should be divulged on a strict need-to-know basis.
Interestingly minnesota prohibits drinking to minors of 21 and piercings and tattoos to minors of 18, without the consent of a parent or guardian.
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