daezor
2yr ago
This may be tangential to your main thesis, but when the opening quote says
Yes, the whole history of humanity, intellectual and moral, political and social, is but a reflection of its economic history.
it's expressing "historical materialism", which is altogether distinct from the metaphysical materialism that the rest of the article focuses on. We might ask e.g. "Did the philosophical ideas of John Locke cause the growth of democracy in the US, or were those ideas epiphenomena of power relations that were emerging anyway?" - but the answer could go either way regardless of whether physical matter is the fundamental stuff of the universe.
daezor
2yr ago
I think there's a reason why "tortured animals as a kid" is a common trope for psychopaths.
I was wondering whether this was a real thing or just a fictional trope. Seems like it's real:
When the science of behavioural profiling began to emerge in the 1970s, one of the most consistent findings reported by the FBI profiling unit was that childhood IATC [intentional animal torture and cruelty] appeared to be a common behaviour among serial murderers and rapists (i.e., those with psychopathic traits characterized by impulsivity, selfishness, and lack of remorse).
But psychology is tricky, especially with things like this, because it's hard to tell what's really human nature versus what's really social conditioning. If there weren't a widespread sentiment in our society that torturing animals is bad, would the psychopathy correlation still hold? I suspect not, based on a hunch that other societies (present and past) don't have such attitudes about torturing animals and yet aren't filled with serial killers. (Admittedly I don't have time to look up examples right now.)
Returning to the topic of vegetarianism, the idea that animal cruelty is bad for psychological reasons has the curious consequence that ethical vegetarianism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - if you believe that eating meat is morally equivalent to inflicting suffering on an animal, then it's a sign of psychopathy for you to do it, but not for someone else who doesn't believe that!
daezor
2yr ago
I suspect that my amount of social activity would drop by about half if I tried to enforce this norm on my friends. I've had people no-show with no notice (text message or otherwise), and when I see them again later they seemingly have no memory of ever having made plans. Can I afford to cut all flaky people out of my life? It seems like a losing battle, but maybe I'll feel differently as I get older.
daezor
2yr ago
I seem to have been shadowbanned already - if I'm not logged in I can't see any of the comments I've made. This is only my 4th comment; how did this happen? I had such high hopes!
daezor
2yr ago
Because all the Cool Kids are doing it, and if you don't join them then you'll find all your friends have disappeared.
I've lately begun to realize that I don't actually need a phone for anything I do by myself. Sure, I sometimes need to provide a phone number for government forms, buying airplane tickets, etc. but that could easily be done through Google Voice or throwaway SMS receivers or something like that. I know my way around town well enough not to need map apps. If I want to listen to music I can use an MP3 player. Etc.
The only problem is social: the norm of making plans and sticking to them is long gone. If I make arrangements to meet someone at location X at time Y, about half the time I'll get a text message while en-route saying "Let's meet at location Z at time W instead". If I later complained that they didn't show up to X@Y as planned, they would accuse me of being unreasonable for not getting with the times and for deigning to leave home without an always-online communication device.
I got rid of Facebook years ago and never looked back, but I have been burned at least once, when I tried to go to an event at the time that had been conveyed to me by word-of-mouth but was later rescheduled via Facebook without my knowledge. Imagine my embarrassment when I was the only person who showed up at the original time!
When COVID began, I finally relented and signed up for Discord to stay in touch with my local friends. What else could I have done? Should I instead have been all alone through that time of crisis, because of my "weird insistence" that my social life should not be mediated by unfriendly third-parties?
Don't get me wrong; I know where you're coming from. But let's not delude ourselves that it's just a matter of our own individual choices. Resistance to the digitization of social life must take place collectively, or not at all.
daezor
2yr ago
if you get off on torture there's probably something dangerous in your psyche
But why would this be so, if it really is a matter of moral indifference? Why would it suggest anything worse about someone's psyche than, say, playing violent video games, or for that matter something totally neutral and unrelated like doing pushups, singing, etc.?
daezor
2yr ago
can white people just do stuff together?
If it's a social club or political movement, sure. A hobby group, same thing - there's nothing about knitting that says it should appeal equally to all kinds of people, or that knitters need to recruit all of humanity into knitting. Likewise, a "pagan" practice like Hinduism / Shinto / etc. would hardly surprise anyone to disproportionately attract Indian / Japanese / etc. people.
But a church (so I've been told - I'm not a churchgoer myself, much less part of your particular denomination) is explicitly not any of those things. The fundamental self-concept of Christianity is that it's the One True Faith and that it's desirable for all people to believe in it. When I see an organization that professes such a doctrine and yet inexplicably has a demographic profile vastly out-of-step with the local population, I begin to suspect that the members don't actually take their own beliefs seriously. This sort of hypocrisy rubs me the wrong way because it seems to demand a greater degree of deference (from both members and non-members) than would be given if they were just open about being a social/political/hobby/cultural etc. group. (I would say the same about the black church.)
You may accuse me of uncharity or of cynically bludgeoning you with Christian doctrine despite not being a Christian myself - which may be valid, but you can take it as just one outsider's impression given my limited time and ability to discern who among the vast array of characters demanding my attention, resources, and respect is actually deserving of them. Whether this is important to you and your church is something for you/them to decide.
Moravec's paradox suggests that white-collar jobs will get automated first. What blue-collar job will be most impacted by AI? Maybe truck driving? Now, there have been advances on that front, but this is still tentative and much less significant than the amount of AI art that's already been created.
Interestingly, the fact that autonomous vehicle companies need government approval before deploying their products shows that the regulatory environment already favors blue-collar workers (at least in this case). By contrast, "creative" work like art etc. is pretty much unregulated.
I've long believed that computer programming would be the last human job to be automated, because once that happens we've basically hit the Singularity already and the new post-human age will dawn the next day. This may be true at the highest levels, but we've already seen over the past few years that the sort of grunt-level work with which most programmers are occupied (hooking up one API to another, getting CSS layouts to look right, etc.) are easy to automate and yet far from eschatological.
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