cuwurious_strag_CA
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User ID: 190
Here's a simple way Musk can use the $8 payment process to verify the account in a manner that is hard for hackers to exploit directly, and also incentivizes them to bother someone else: no CC, you pay via bank transfer authorized by Plaid.
I highly, highly doubt that. Musk and twitter seem to be approaching this as a generic way to make money, slapped on top of Twitter Blue, and any friction there will significantly hurt revenue. I'll follow it, and if he does, that'd be my mistake. But I'm pretty sure you'll be able to pay for blue with a credit card.
Even then though, a cracked bank account (via cracking.com) seems to be around $100, which is still much cheaper than $1500, so ... it's not helping! (note: prices seem to vary a lot - some sell verification for $60/$150, others sell for $800-$1500, maybe the former is scamming i dunno)
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
That doesn't change the point at all - if that happens at all (and it does), then arrest people who are knowingly breaking the law, instead of people who were told they could vote!
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
why are the children of our elites so consistently idiots and drug addicts
They aren't any moreso than anyone else - there are a lot of poor drug addicts, being smart doesn't necessarily prevent you from being a drug addict, and the high levels of intelligence require a lot of randomness / non-additive genetic variation / other unknown (non-shared-environment) factors, so children of the smartest aren't as good on average, even though they're still smart. Coming apart at the tails etc, once you've milked all you can from currently-existing additive variation you can only get a lot better with something else.
Arguably, the destruction of civilian targets by bombing civilian targets in japan, which seems like very roughly 300k, so 150k without nukes, was at the same scale as the nukes: The two bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians. So it was a significant contributor then. And, iirc, Japan was close to surrendering even if the nukes hadn't been used.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
There's a subtlety here, though. Why is it a separate personality trait, and not a 'component' of intelligence? Because if you are an 'intelligent person' 'wasting your potential', and that waste-of-potential is set up in such a way that it can't easily be externally fixed because you need to have that "drive" to figure out a bunch of different things to be smart, then that's just another cause of having lower intelligence.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
But as I said, if he was returning to a different topic, that would ... also be internal, like, neurons, or maybe a soul or something, so the external/internal dichotomy isn't useful here? Presumably he returns to the topic [in this theoretical example because I still have no idea what the topic is, or what ymeskhout is alleged to be doing here, this is just a tangent about some psychological argument] for some specific reason. And that reason would be about external things - he's trying to inform us, the topic is interesting, etc - just like the reason would be if he was talking about something else instead! So I don't really see how it's external or internal, but just incorrect vs correct.
Also, can you just say what the "topic" is, and give an example of "prior engagement" being ignored, or something? I genuinely have no idea what you or dean meant.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I spend so much time here on The Motte that I end up feeling like people who are anti-progressive are probably more thoughtful and less crazy than progressives and more in touch with reality. But that's probably not true
Well, they have nothing to do with each other. Even if moldbug/NRX is the future, that doesn't make aryan prison gangs any more intelligent. The highest points of what one could call Christian European society coexisted with plenty of stupid villagers who were also christian and european. And the best progressive intellectuals coexisted with low brow tabloids / yellow journalism and street gangs. It's very easy to take something quality and make it less so, whether by genetics or drift, and it doesn't indicate at all the high quality version is not so.
Is there any evidence that we're not just rambling buffoons in our own echo chamber, just like I'd find on either end of the spectrum?
Well, there's no "outside view" evidence of that by definition, but that can't prevent themotte from being better. The posts here need to stand for themselves, and some do!
This is probably the most complete deplatforming anyone who hasn't actually committed a crime yet has ever experienced
Statements like this usually aren't true. I guess if you take 'deplatforming' to mean only this very specific context, but consider how 'freedom of speech' was a much less-held value anwyhere in something like the 18th or 19th centuries than it was either today or in the 20th, and consider the regular 'censorship' (and the sort of censorship might vary a lot) of newspapers back then, worse has likely happened. Josh could just be put in jail!
I believe that KF has significant value in the culture war for the red team
KF focuses on the most degenerate, spergy, and loud creatures on the internet, though. While what's wrong with kathryn gibes or chris-chan is related to what's wrong with 'the left' in some senses i guess, there's a lot of difference - and learning more about the bizzare and retarded exploits of the recurring characters is genuinely useful, by characterizing the ways human action can go wrong and can be surprising (which is arguably why it's funny), seeing 'crazy ugly trans person threatens suicide, posts newest medical mishap' doesn't do that much to characterize progressives or trans as a whole. So ... what does KF actually do for the red team, exactly? That people are willing to directly make fun of individual weak, stupid, degenerate people directly, and can see examples of others doing so, is valuable in a sense - but how does this translate directly to a 'red win', whether that means more R votes or neoreaction, and how is it different than past magazines or communities doing something similar (which did not translate to wins)?
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Conservatives would not be happy with calling transwomen 'ladyboys' but treating them the exact way, socially, as women. (Notably, ... if you are treating something the exact same way as a woman, then calling it "woman" isn't that much of a stretch). It'd be nice if they'd argue that, though
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
It's very difficult to create a rule "allow mild use of steroids, but don't allow more extreme use of steroids
This is true if "rule" means "lightly enforced law, for the general population". However, the navy could very easily (technically, idk about politically) run a "properly used steroid" program themselves, provide the drugs, ensure they're administered very safely, and still test for use of other drugs. If done well, this might reduce steroid use in general. (good idea? dunno. just a point about the power of a sovereign).
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I would not be overly surprised if they found themselves in a situation where Scott and 10 other high-decouplers uselessly decry this new trend of EAers embezzling for malaria nets
The entire EA forum is filled with people saying 'this is bad and evil and disgusting EA would never support this we made a severe mistake in blindly trusting SBF we deeply apologize we must be very careful to make sure this doesn't happen again'. And those posts are now the top posts of all time on the EA forum. They're also explicitly saying things like 'utilitarianism taken too far can look like this which is why we endorse pluralism and moderation', and they've said things like that beforehand. So I don't think the 'allergic to 2nd order effects' criticism applies!
Your first piece is from an addiction center. In my experience browsing the web, addiction center webpages are often just an amalgam of various science-sounding claims that don't really mean anything but very emphatically suggest that addiction is bad, and scientific, and should be treated. They're just not worth reading. That doesn't mean any individual claim on the website is wrong, just that one shouldn't cite them. Wikipedia is leagues above them.
Alcohol affects the prefrontal cortex first. This part of the brain is responsible for judgment, reasoning, and suppressing impulsive behavior
The prefrontal cortex does a whole bunch of things. Plausibly even most things.
The basic activity of this brain region is considered to be orchestration of thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals.[2] Many authors have indicated an integral link between a person's will to live, personality, and the functions of the prefrontal cortex.[3] This brain region has been implicated in executive functions, such as planning, decision making, short-term memory, personality expression, moderating social behavior and controlling certain aspects of speech and language.[4][5][6] Executive function relates to abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, working toward a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and social "control" (the ability to suppress urges that, if not suppressed, could lead to socially unacceptable outcomes).
That sounds like it covers all complex human behaviors, honestly (also imo this part of neuroscience is very messy and a lot of it is wrong, given how complicated people and their actions are, what is 'moderating social behavior', exactly, can we really attribute that to a brain region rather than much more complex higher level interaction, blablabla). And if you're suppressing all of that - that's not going to 'reveal true hidden desires', it's just gonna mess everything up. But impulses aren't discrete or ... real in any sense, they're just vague descriptions of complex, useful actions made by a complex system. A desire to be racist - like, if I read a bunch of studies and, like scott alexander, regretfully decide that there probably are racial differences in IQ, am I desiring to be racist? Why is there necessarily an innate desire to be racist component that's distinct from a complex network making decisions, and knocking out some parts of that, making it worse, might lead to things that 'sound racist', but that doesn't tell us anything direct about the desires of a person. Consider tourettes or harm OCD (and I could go on another tangent about that) - these people do not have a suppressed desire to say slurs or kill people in a normal sense, yet 'express' or 'feel' them anyway!
I'd argue that the PFC both 'suppresses impulsive behavior' and 'generates impulsive behavior', but not even in an absolute sense, as part of a really complicated set of interactions we don't really understand. So going from 'alcohol affects PFC + PFC suppresses behavior' -> 'alcohol releases suppressed behavior as a primary and separable effect' just isn't a reasonable conclusion - honestly, 'behaviors' aren't even a fixed thing, and 'suppressing an existing impulse' doesn't necessarily have any meaning outside some useful context. And in particular, concluding that 'in wino veritas' is not justified at all.
Your other source is "DRUNK - How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization - BY EDWARD SLINGERLAND", who is a a Canadian-American sinologist and philosopher. He is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Again, not exactly a systematic review.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I'm not sure how entirely true the former is, my details on christianity are hazy, but 'jesus righteous anger' gets a lot of results, like this. Righteous anger on behalf of the poor or something
Jesus is just one example, you can look elsewhere - political speeches. There's a lot of forceful speech against bad people, and a lot of strong expressions along with it. It varies in intensity - hitler and goebbels was angrier than obama, but obama's recent speeches aren't exactly placid happiness either.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I think it's possible and useful to understand peoples' motivations, tbh? A number of examples: many historical famous far-left-wingers are protestors/revolutionaries, people who sacrifice themselves for 'the people' or 'the fight against slavery', etc. Many of the most rich people in America are centrists (i.e. progressives-of-history like everyone else!), and like most everyone else genuinely care / want to help poor people, the oppressed, africans - and so donate a lot of money to assisting them - gates foundation, EA, etc.
It would be nice to have a proper study on detransitioners where this is all taken into account, and the only group asking for it is detransitioners and their supporters.
There are a bunch of detransitioner studies on e.g. google scholar, although their results are kind of all over the place
False. The selection effect, to the extent it exists, is a result of the
I concede I made the point poorly, but - here's another example of right-wing anti-trans content, /r/neovaginadisasters. It's more or less what it sounded like, and was pretty NSFW. It got passed around a lot on right-wing reddit discord a few years ago. It had its own selection effect - less-careful people who browed it often came away with a belief that like 50% of SRS cases were disasters that the patient regretted severely. But that kind of content doesn't show up on @realchrisrufo's twitter feed, for a number of reasons (nsfw, not respectable, etc). There's also the kind of anti-trans content that criticizes being trans in a direct material sense - this is what being trans is, this is why it's bad - and you don't see much of that from @realchrisrufo either. One example of the latter is just screenshots from /r/egg_irl, /r/tranmsgender, etc. Even if you're restricting yourself to anti-trans content, the current approach from the center-right is a very highly selected set of content aimed specifically at 'sympathy for poor oppressed under 18 transitioners', combined with 'groomer teachers and doctors and schools', which IMO paints a very biased and confused picture of trans as a whole.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Jesus's reverence at washing shoes demonstrated a supposed moral virtue of caring for the meek, the downtrodden. This was understood, and followed, by billions. Buddhism, too, is a complex set of claims that guide peoples' actions, understanding, etc. Mental states aren't merely states, there isn't any value in, say, permanently 'reverently washing shoes' aside from the outcomes of it. Also tangential, but 'possesing the fortitude to self-immolate' is not that difficult, suicidal people do it every day, and it's quite analogous to fighting in a battle/war you know you'll probably die in - something dome by at least a billion people, historically.
So these interesting mental states are hollow without corresponding understanding or action. If I take all your neurons and just ... immerse them in dopamine or heroin or something, forever, do you feel infinite pleasure? (no, you just die). What would it even mean to be perpetually in a state of equanimity or reverence? Imagine you're literally frozen in time, in that 'state'. Again, you're just dead, functionally.
Not that said 'states', in particular ones buddhism describes, aren't interesting - just that the above vision entirely decouples them from any purpose whatsoever. "After AI takes over, we'll masturbate forever, except with equinamity!"
Pain as a non-voluntary state could be mostly removed from the adult human experience if everyone was equipped with excellent mindfulness techniques from birth
Is pain anything more than ... understanding a negative imperative or harm? The person still needs to react to potential issues, right? So ... if the hand touches a fire, the thermoreceptors fire, action potentials go to the brain, action potentials go back moving the hand away, the person rapidly makes sure it doesn't happen again. Without pain? "What would it be like if you didn't hear. Well, the vibrations still travel through the ear, you still understand the noises, but it's not hearing, something else". It's a koan - pain is contingent and empty, but it already is, and making it not-exist won't change that.
If the AI did take over, wouldn't it be capable of better, more complex and subtle, 'mental states' anyway? That seems like an issue.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I'm genuinely not sure what OP's thesis is, exactly.
Genetics can change substantially over thousands of years
I don't think 200 years is enough for the recent cultural changes in japan, india, europe, or anywhere else that 'developed'. There probably were evolved genetic changes in 'behavior' in some senses, but I genuinely don't know what those might be, and they're probably rather contingent and complicated. Similarly - racial differences in 'attitudes', organization, or something are ... plausible, but I'm really not sure what they might be, and strongly suspect they mix in complex ways with the existing culture than anything like 'being more aggressive', 'being less emotional', etc. (And also significant variation within races, etc)
(like with intelligence, this isn't a reason to reject sorting, hierarchy, genetics being critical for any sort of virtue, etc - just that it doesn't follow racial lines very closely)
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
"They were punished lightly by almost any historical standard" is worth noting. (but @ "perhaps, in fact, in the kind of country the rioters might dream of creating", J6 rioters were more enthusiastic trump supporting republicans with some Q people, as opposed to altright or 'new right' or neoreactionaries, afaict)
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I think it's not unreasonable to call surgery violence toward a tumor. Certainly more reasonable than "silence is violence" woke type usage.
Why do people keep making this argument? "My enemies, who I also think are lying hypocrites, made <ridiculous and unjustifiable claim>. And my claim is slightly better than theirs, so I get to make it, and you can't object it's nonsense."
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
The 'pain' avoided in the latter scenario is precisely the knowledge that death is bad and sacrifices the potential use and greatness of the rest of your life. A wholesome morphine injection, with associated hospital and regulatory paperwork for the assisted suicide and nurses and doctors and psychologists, could plausibly be more expensive than a street closure to clean up your split-in-half body. Why need a dozen people to sign some paper to accomplish what a small piece of metal in an artery could?
I further disagree with your elevation of suicidal terrorists. They're rabid dogs who need to be put down
Unless they're john brown or george washington or jesus!
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
It's the same issue as the race/IQ debate. You have people who are 130Iq on this site arguing that the US going from 100IQ to 95IQ is a CATASTROPHE. But what about the gap between 100 and 130? And for racism - ok, blacks are some number of points less. But - ">130IQ people" are 30 points higher than the average american. Isn't that a much more important bit?
It's harder for the smart people to support welfare payments for X + 150 million than it is for just X.
Yeah, but the solution is for the 130IQ people to have more children, or do eugenics, in either case. The difference between 100 and 95 is swamped by 100 - 130.
People with an IQ of 90 are plenty smart enough to realize that they can get what they want by voting for the party that will take from the middle class and give to the poor
this is not that stark. A lot of poorer people still vote R, esp if white. Also ... don't the democrats want higher taxes on the rich, and the republicans want lower taxes on the rich? I don't have a preference on the issue, but have never understood the 'take from the middle class' argument.
I guess it depends on what you mean by 'collapse'. I don't think the US will stop existing, but I think life will get drastically and permanently worse for me and my family.
Can you name a specific way that'll happen?
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
No, 4channers use slurs because a combination of 'intending to piss people off because it's funny' and 'actually disliking trans/gay/black people'. ("based?") The ratio between the two probably has changed over its history. But it isn't to keep out speech policers!
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
This is ... really confused, capitalism and capitalists has long had goals other than profit maximization, you can see that in the extensive philanthropy many do (whether explicitly left-wing or initially right-wing). the 'profit maximization function' has had ... components ... you'd call left wing long before 'ESG'. I mean, the civil rights act was decades before ESG, and that's also supposed to be neo-marxism, right?
Also, what on earth does ESG have to do with ... whatever an 'identity' is?
Also, how is 'marxism / leftism erases identity' meaningful at all? I could just as well say 'neo-marxism creates identities - gay, lesbian, black, oppressed, minority, disabled, feminist'. This is actually a common claim, remember "identity politics"?
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
The person's claims, to the extent they're coherent at all, are a combination of: "the left wants to do medical research on fetuses" - nobody on 'the left' cares - "planned parenthood is incentivized to cause more abortions because they get monetary compensation for selling fetuses" - when you combine the frequency of said tissue donation and the compensation, it is not relevant to their bottom line.
Wrong in both ways, imo? EAs are very emotionally moved by the dying african children, generally. Hard to argue for with a source, i guess. Closest I can try - EAs like Alexander Berger (open phil co-CEO), for instance, donated a kidney to someone he'd never met to help save their life. That doesn't feel like an action you take with 'absence of emotional salience'. Another one would be the strong moral sense EAs have about how important their work is, to the point that burning out of EA because it was totalizing / took over your life is a somewhat-common issue. (although I would not argue that's a criticism of EA itself.)
But - every large movement that's ever had strong 'emotional salience' combined with strong moral teachings has had many, many prominent figures who have broken those teachings or done other bad things. Christianity, progressivism, conservatism, etc. Christians, progressives, conservatives, people of any other group - commit crimes, scam all the time. Sam doesn't say much about utilitarianism/EA other than 'some of its followers often do very bad things', which is true for any set of morals. One can say utilitarianism/EA isn't necessarily better at preventing misconduct than other belief systems, but one can't say it's worse, absent ... any evidence of that - and it never claimed to be better, just that donating money to starving children was worthwhile. And if you compare the outcomes to other crypto exchanges that've collapsed (there are many) - hundreds of millions to 'effective projects' + crypto scams versus ... hundreds of millions to luxury goods plus crypto scam?
"I think the EA’s failure to have any effective impact on Bankman’s moral calculus is its complete absence of emotional salience" is compared to " Its stories are designed for emotional salience, using novelty/paradox/shock in key moments to illustrate the moral point", yet
How can you seriously claim this "lacks emotional salience"? drowning child you are personally causing to die? really?
christianity, again, doesn't actually stop this from happening. christians constantly "sin". plus, utilitarianism/EA contests your deontological claim about what "we ought" to do, and effectively, the local wholesome 'feed the homeless' drive really does just save fewer lives than malaria nets, so how on earth is the former more christian?
I think half of the 'EA isn't morally salient' claim comes from things like - donating lots of money made from facebook stocks to global health charities. In one sense, it's incredibly technical and complicated, and isn't a group emoting session around an altar - more like a spreadsheet of estimated disability-adjusted life years saved. But even given the deep philosophical problems the spreadsheet has, the money is still going to global health causes, and the EAs seem to care emotionally about the recipients.
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