erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
4mo ago
Because you can't program virtue ethics into an AI. You need a utility function.
All of Yudkowsky's philosophical work is grounded on the framework of AI development.
Effective accelerationism. By analogy with effective altruism, the Nick Landian position of trying to to bring about superhuman intelligence as quickly/certainly as possible, even if it kills all humans. Should that happen, it was just the next step in the universe's evolution. The only moral action is the minimization of entropy, after all.
Even Eliezer Yudkowsky was a proto e/acc, in his younger days.
Lately, the term is getting watered down into a sort of generic techno-progress label.
- https://twitter.com/AISafetyMemes/status/1683462000360280065
- https://twitter.com/liron/status/1682825830630674432
- https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1683208767054438400
Either way, on the AI question, the e/acc's are the ones firmly on the side of full steam ahead, while ordinary people are calling for a pause and Eliezer Yudkowsky is shouting stop.
erwgv3g34
6mo ago
Osama bin Laden was definitely right about one thing – if people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they instinctively like the strong horse.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
And in America preventing 16-year olds from dating older men is a thing that parents probably do more often than they allow it. 16 is a common age of consent in the USA.
True. Which makes it so hilariously sad two years later when those same parents send their daughters off to college in another city/state without a second thought, where they will completely lose the ability to prevent their daughters from making such mistakes.
How many fathers who proudly subscribe to the "Rules for Dating my Daughter" would react with shock and outrage if you suggested that maybe paying for their little princess to spend four years away from parental supervision in an environment full of sex, drugs, and alcohol is not the best idea? Probably most of them.
The "other people" it happens to is always an audience surrogate for the female reader to self-insert into, in the same way the ordinary high school student at the center of a harem anime exists for male viewers to relate to.
Even in the best case scenario where no one does this, you still have estrangement, with the added disadvantage of spousal rights remaining intact. So if your spouse decides to move out and abandon you, she's still entitled to the spousal share of your estate because in most states you can't just disinherit your wife.
And now she is entitled half your assets, plus alimony and child support; not exactly an improvement.
What the articles tells me is that getting women into science is simply not worth the trouble; each time some broad opens her piehole, we lose a luminary.
Can you imagine if this nonsense had been around while Richard Feynman was still alive?
Jesus's teachings were impractical. Typical millenarian preacher; world is going to end soon, why bother with Gnon-compliance? Focus on making sure you are ready for the next world. Repent! The Kingdom of God is at hand.
Which is why actual Christianity is mostly based on the teachings of Paul, not Jesus. As long as you tithe your 10%, show up to Church once a week, and make a token effort at avoiding sin, you can live a normal life pursuing money and status and still go to heaven.
It's intellectually bankrupt, but it works; whereas a civilization of holy fools would be unsustainable.
erwgv3g34
2mo ago
Can you pause the forum for a few days and restore as many of these posts as possible?
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
And while I can't find it at the moment, I recall a Nepalese study that found similar results for "Western-style" grade schools but, interestingly, not for "Islamic" ones.
"Impact of female education on fertility status of Muslim community" by Irshad Khan, as linked to in "The Cause of Population Decline" by the Dreaded Jim.
Look, SkookumTree has staked his whole reputation on this. If he doesn't do it, he will never be able to show his face around here again; anytime he tried to wade into the culture war thread, he would be dismissed with "isn't there a Hock you should be doing?" The mods can stop us from posting it, but nobody can stop us from thinking it. Skookum would become the laughingstock of the entire forum. What's he supposed to do, delete his account?
Better to die with dignity.
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
While I don't think you should start having babies the second you turn 20 years old
You are right; better to get started as teenagers.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
RE: The Watch Thread, I wear a Casio W800H. I picked it over the more iconic F91W because it tells you the date as well as the time, and it was only $10 more, which I figured was negligible amortized over the battery's 10-year lifespan. What does that say about me?
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
I'm Latino. I'd support a politician that wanted to take away the Hispanic franchise, because my fellow Latinos tend to vote for socialism at a much higher rate than Anglos.
Would you be okay with a guy fucking some of the senior girls or recently graduated graduated senior girls if he wasn't a teacher? Why?
My answer is that it would be okay for a high school teacher to marry one of his students; i.e. to make a lifelong commitment to supporting her and their children in exchange for exclusive sexual access. Conversely, it is not okay for a dude to pump and dump several high school girls, or recent high school graduates; the fact that the man in question happens to be their teacher is completely irrelevant.
erwgv3g34
6mo ago
And a part me laughs a bit. They fucked around and found out. They didn’t do anything when the other white ethnicities were getting blasted and some orgs like the ADL promote white hate. And then the gun was turned on them.
Not only did they do nothing, not only was it some orgs; subversive anti-white ideology has always been highly disproportionality Jewish. There is a reason things like the early life Wikipedia section and the coincidence detection triple parenthesis echo became memes.
Frankenstein is finally getting attacked by his own monster.
Two major memetic transmission vectors for progressivism, including transsexualism: the media and the education system. To protect your son, need to be willing to homeschool and kill your television (including streaming).
From "The cause of population decline" by the Dreaded Jim:
The Amish absolutely insist on controlling their kids schooling. They also ban television. They allow their adolescent kids out into the world to visit the fleshpots, but not, however, the classrooms. They fear both the classrooms and the televisions, but primarily the classrooms.
I would say that it is memetic infection, the same memeplex, propagated both by soap operas and the education system, each reinforcing the other, but primarily by the education system.
And from "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" by AntiDem:
First, as the leftists used to say, “Kill Your Television”. I am not one who generally thinks that machines are inherently evil. Television is an exception. It is no more and no less than a hypnotic mind control device. Don’t believe me? Sit a hyperactive toddler in front of a television and watch what happens. They freeze, turn away from everything they were doing, and stare at the screen. Gavin McInnes once noted that the “on” switch of his television was an “off” switch for his kids, and so it is. Do you think this device does not place ideas in the minds of those who fall into a trance in its presence? And what ideas do you think the Hollywood/New York axis wishes to place there? I recall reading one account of a father who, tired of his two under-10 daughters’ bratty attitudes, limited their television viewing to a DVD box set of Little House on The Prairie. The change in his daughters’ behavior was dramatic – within a couple of weeks, they were referring to him and his wife as “Ma” and “Pa”, and offering to help with chores. The lesson is obvious: people (and especially children) learn their social norms from television, far more even than from the people around them.
Ideally, one would cut oneself off from it totally. Many find this rather difficult (I must admit, myself included at times). Some keep a television set, but make sure it is disconnected from broadcast channels and use it only as a monitor for a carefully-selected library of DVDs. Others (myself included) don’t own a set, but download a few select programs from torrent sites and watch on laptops or tablets. My total viewership of television programs tops out at perhaps 3-4 hours per week during particularly good seasons. Any traditionalist should strive to do the same. In fact, traditionalists should reject – should “drop out” of – all popular culture (especially that produced after, say, 1966) to the greatest degree possible, and make sure their children are exposed to it as little as possible. Music, video games, even the web – either drop out of it completely, or, at very least, carefully limit the time and scope of it in your life and the lives of your children.
While we’re on the subject of children: DO NOT send your children to a public school. “Drop out” here too; by which I do not mean that your children should go uneducated, but that you should – you must – homeschool. To do otherwise is pure child abuse. Perhaps fifty years ago, this was not the case, but these times are not those times. The failures of the public schools need not be repeated here, but they are undeniable, and any reasonably smart ten-year-old whose attention span hasn’t been destroyed by television can learn more by being left alone all day with a stack of books than they can in any public school classroom anyway. As for the universities, there are not quite any suitable replacements for them yet, but some lurk just over the horizon and will appear before long.
To say that one should “drop out” of – not bother listening to and not ever trusting – the mainstream news media goes without saying.
College is harder. Long way off, but think ahead. Learn a trade?
These days, lots of kids also transed by internet; do not give smartphone. If must use computer/internet, do so on desktop in living room in clear view of everyone. Otherwise, at risk from TikTok, Discord, and porn.
Yes, this is somewhat hardcore asceticism. Is necessary. As society becomes more degenerate, a greater level of eccentricity is required to keep healthy. Same as addiction.
Should also go to church, the tradder the better. If right ethnicity, become Orthodox; if not, Catholic or Mormon. Islam is also resistant, but has serious downsides; last resort.
erwgv3g34
2mo ago
Reposting a comment I made that got lost during the rollback:
Catholicism tells us that the wine and bread are LITERALLY the blood and body of christ. It is not compatible with science.
On the contrary, transubstantiation is a belief that is almost designed to be perfectly compatible with science.
Specifically, Catholicism claims that all the "accidents" of the wine and bread remain the same, but that the "substance" of the wine and bread become the blood and body of Christ. In other words, in every single way that we can observe and measure, the wine and bread remain wine and bread. But in some deeper, fundamental way, the wine and bread become the blood and body of Jesus.
Which is nonsense, but it's nonsense of the not even wrong variety. And while "not even wrong" is a bad thing for a scientific theory to be, it is a very good thing for a religious belief to be. Partly because it means the religion is safe from being falsified by scientific evidence, but much more importantly because the religion will not be driven insane by the need to deny reality.
Contrast creationism; if you have committed your faith to 7 days and Noah's ark, then when Darwin shows up with dinosaur fossils in his arms you have to either renounce your God or you have to turn your back on biology. And geology. And cosmology. And...
In "Universal Fire", Eliezer Yudkowsky points out that all of reality is connected, and that you can't change just one little thing without changing the whole.
Matches catch fire because of phosphorus—“safety matches” have phosphorus on the ignition strip; strike-anywhere matches have phosphorus in the match heads. Phosphorus is highly reactive; pure phosphorus glows in the dark and may spontaneously combust. (Henning Brand, who purified phosphorus in 1669, announced that he had discovered Elemental Fire.) Phosphorus is thus also well-suited to its role in adenosine triphosphate, ATP, your body’s chief method of storing chemical energy. ATP is sometimes called the “molecular currency”. It invigorates your muscles and charges up your neurons. Almost every metabolic reaction in biology relies on ATP, and therefore on the chemical properties of phosphorus.
If a match stops working, so do you. You can’t change just one thing.
The surface-level rules, “Matches catch fire when struck,” and “Humans need air to breathe,” are not obviously connected. It took centuries to discover the connection, and even then, it still seems like some distant fact learned in school, relevant only to a few specialists. It is all too easy to imagine a world where one surface rule holds, and the other doesn’t; to suppress our credence in one belief, but not the other. But that is imagination, not reality. If your map breaks into four pieces for easy storage, it doesn’t mean the territory is also broken into disconnected parts. Our minds store different surface-level rules in different compartments, but this does not reflect any division in the laws that govern Nature.
We can take the lesson further. Phosphorus derives its behavior from even deeper laws, electrodynamics and chromodynamics. “Phosphorus” is merely our word for electrons and quarks arranged a certain way. You cannot change the chemical properties of phosphorus without changing the laws governing electrons and quarks.
If you stepped into a world where matches failed to strike, you would cease to exist as organized matter.
In "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning", Scott Alexander elaborates on the sociopolitical consequences:
So imagine the most irrelevant orthodoxy you can think of. Let’s say tomorrow, the government chooses “lightning comes after thunder” as their hill to die on. They come up with some BS justification like how atmospheric moisture in a thunderstorm slows the speed of light. If you think you see lightning before thunder, you’re confused – there’s lots of lightning and thunder during storms, maybe you grouped them together wrong. Word comes down from the UN, the White House, the Kremlin, Zhongnanhai, the Vatican, etc – everyone must believe this. Senior professors and funding agencies are all on board. From a scientific-truth point of view it’s kind of a disaster. But who cares? Nothing at all depends on this. Even the meteorologists don’t really care. What’s the worst-case scenario? Nobody can say “Lightning comes before thunder, but our social norm is to pretend otherwise”. They have to say “We love objective truth-seeking, and we’ve discovered that lightning does not come before thunder”. And so the Kantoroviches of the world will believe that’s what they really think, and try to write polite letters correcting them.
The better a scientist is, and the more curiosity they have about the natural world, and the more they feel deep in their gut that Nature ought to fit together – the more likely the lightning thing will bother them. Somebody’s going to check how light works and realize that rain can’t possibly slow it down that much. Someone else will see claims about lightning preceding thunder in old books, and realize how strange it was for the ancients to get something so simple so wrong so consistently. Someone else will just be an obsessive observer of the natural world, and be very sure they weren’t counting thunderclaps and lightning bolts in the wrong order. And the more perceptive and truth-seeking these people are, the more likely they’ll speak, say “Hey, I think we’ve got the lightning thing wrong” and not shut up about it, and society will have to destroy them.
And the better a school or professor is, the better they train their students to question everything and really try to understand the natural world, the more likely their students will speak up about the lightning issue. The government will make demands – close down the offending schools, fire the offending academics. Good teachers will be systematically removed from the teaching profession; bad teachers will be systematically promoted. Any educational method that successfully instills curiosity and the scientific spirit will become too dangerous to touch; any that encourage rote repetition of approved truths will get the stamp of approval. Some other beliefs will be found to correlate heavily with lightning-heresy. Maybe atheists are more often lightning-heretics; maybe believers in global warming are too. The enemies of these groups will have a new cudgel to beat them with, “If you believers in global warming are so smart and scientific, how come so many of you believe in lightning, huh?” Even the savvy Kolmogorovs within the global warming community will be forced to admit that their theory just seems to attract uniquely crappy people. It won’t be very convincing. Any position correlated with being truth-seeking and intelligent will be always on the retreat, having to forever apologize that so many members of their movement screw up the lightning question so badly.
Some people in the know will try to warn their friends and students – “Look, just between you and me, lightning obviously comes before thunder, but for the love of God don’t say that in public“. Just as long as they’re sure that student will never want to blackmail them later. And won’t be able to gain anything by ratting them out. And that nobody will hack their private email ten years later, then get them fired or imprisoned or burned at the stake or whatever the appropriate punishment for lightning-heresy is. It will become well-known that certain academic fields like physics and mathematics are full of crypto-lightning-heretics. Everyone will agree that physicists and mathematicians are useless eggheads who are probably good at some specific problems, but so blind to the context of important real-world issues that they can’t be trusted on anything less abstruse than e equalling mc squared. Dishonest careerists willing to go in front of the camera and say “I can reassure everyone, as a physicist that physics proves sound can travel faster than light, and any scientists saying otherwise are just liars and traitors” will get all the department chairs and positions of power.
But the biggest threat is to epistemology. The idea that everything in the world fits together, that all knowledge is worth having and should be pursued to the bitter end, that if you tell one lie the truth is forever after your enemy – all of this is incompatible with even as stupid a mistruth as switching around thunder and lightning. People trying to make sense of the world will smash their head against the glaring inconsistency where the speed of light must be calculated one way in thunderstorms and another way everywhere else. Try to start a truth-seeking community, and some well-meaning idiot will ask “Hey, if we’re about pursuing truth, maybe one fun place to pursue truth would be this whole lightning thing that has everyone all worked up, what does everybody think about this?” They will do this in perfect innocence, because they don’t know that everyone else has already thought about it and agreed to pretend it’s true. And you can’t just tell them that, because then you’re admitting you don’t really think it’s true. And why should they even believe you? Would you present your evidence? Would you dare?
As the Dreaded Jim famously said:
The fundamental realization of the Dark Enlightenment is that all men are not created equal, not individual men, nor the various groups and categories of men, nor are women equal to men, that these beliefs and others like them are religious beliefs, that society is just as religious as ever it was, with an official state religion of progressivism, but this is a new religion, an evil religion, and, if you are a Christian, a demonic religion.
The Dark Enlightenment does not propose that leftism went wrong four years ago, or ten years ago, but that it was fundamentally and terribly wrong a couple of centuries ago, and we have been heading to hell in a handbasket ever since at a rapidly increasing rate – that the enlightenment was dangerously optimistic about humans, human nature, and the state, that it is another good news religion, telling us what we wish to hear, but about this world instead of the next.
If authority required me to believe in Leprechauns, and to get along with people that it was important to get along with required me to believe in Leprechauns, I would probably believe in leprechauns, though not in the way that I believe in rabbits, but I can see people not being equal, whereas I cannot see leprechauns not existing.
And:
If we only count religions that officially admit to being supernatural, pretty obviously religion is declining. If, however, we define religion more broadly, then religion is increasing by leaps and bounds.
If authority assures you that leprechauns exist and that authority can see them, it does not take much faith to believe, since you cannot see leprechauns not existing. If, however, authority assures you that all humans are equal, or that all groups and categories of human are equal, it takes outstanding and extraordinary faith, since every day you see individuals, groups, and categories being strikingly and obviously unequal, for reasons cultural, genetic, and hormonal.
Further, belief in the flying spaghetti monster not only does no harm, but is apt to inculcate the accumulated wisdom of the ages, inculcating prudent and virtuous behavior, whereas belief in equality tends to inculcate bad behavior, as illustrated by the inability of “Occupy” to operate an urban campsite.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
Not all humans have 135 IQ (supposedly the average here)
Lolwut?
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pJJdcZgB6mPNWoSWr/2013-survey-results
Can we finally resolve this IQ controversy that comes up every year?
The story so far—our first survey in 2009 found an average IQ of 146. Everyone said this was stupid, no community could possibly have that high an average IQ, it was just people lying and/or reporting results from horrible Internet IQ tests. Although IQ fell somewhat the next few years—to 140 in 2011 and 139 in 2012 - people continued to complain. So in 2012 we started asking for SAT and ACT scores, which are known to correlate well with IQ and are much harder to get wrong. These scores confirmed the 139 IQ result on the 2012 test. But people still objected that something must be up.
This year our IQ has fallen further to 138 (no Flynn Effect for us!) but for the first time we asked people to describe the IQ test they used to get the number. So I took a subset of the people with the most unimpeachable IQ tests—ones taken after the age of 15 (when IQ is more stable), and from a seemingly reputable source. I counted a source as reputable either if it name-dropped a specific scientifically validated IQ test (like WAIS or Raven’s Progressive Matrices), if it was performed by a reputable institution (a school, a hospital, or a psychologist), or if it was a Mensa exam proctored by a Mensa official.
This subgroup of 101 people with very reputable IQ tests had an average IQ of 139 - exactly the same as the average among survey respondents as a whole.
I don’t know for sure that Mensa is on the level, so I tried again deleting everyone who took a Mensa test—leaving just the people who could name-drop a well-known test or who knew it was administered by a psychologist in an official setting. This caused a precipitous drop all the way down to 138.
The IQ numbers have time and time again answered every challenge raised against them and should be presumed accurate.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/17/ssc-survey-2017-results/#comment-476694
We have this argument every year. Points in favor include:
- Survey IQs mostly match survey SATs from IQ/SAT conversion tables.
- One year we asked ACT and that matched too.
- One time we made everybody describe which IQ test they took and in what circumstance, and the subset who took provably legit IQ tests given by provably legit psychologists weren’t any different from the rest.
I don’t doubt that a lot of the overly high numbers are people who took a test as kids which wasn’t properly normed for kids their age or something.
erwgv3g34
4mo ago
If I put a baby in her, maybe she'll relax.
Yeah, this. Women have an instinct to take care of small, cute, helpless creatures. Normally that instinct is supposed to help them raise their children, but with no kids they redirect the impulse towards cats and dogs instead, not unlike a man who masturbates to porn for lack of a girlfriend. She'll stop obsessing over fur babies once she has some real babies. Move up the wedding date and get to work.
erwgv3g34
11mo ago
How can an army fight without a general? The Pope won't even speak up against the German Catholics supporting gay "marriage". The Church needed a Tywin Lannister, and got a Tytos instead.
Well in a modern society male protection isn't particularly necessary
Of course it is; it's just socialized. Who provides protection for women in modern society? Cops and soldiers. Who are those? Men. How do they get paid? Taxes. Who produces most taxable income? Men.
In other words, men are still providing protection for women, but now we do it collectively rather than individually, and we don't get any benefit out of it.
Same thing with women's so-called economic independence, which is heavily reliant on welfare, alimony, child support, affirmative action quotas, and anti-discrimination laws. Working men are still supporting women, but now we don't get anything in return.
It was a hundred dollar bill laying on the ground. Sooner or later some ambitious young activist was going to pick it up and ride to power on the back of racial grievances.
It took a while because all the people who originally enacted the noble lie in the 60s knew the truth. But they made it so that you could not speak the truth, and eventually a new crop of children grew up never learning the truth while hearing the lie repeated again and again in their televisions and classrooms. They did not get the joke.
Anything which is common knowledge but which cannot be said out loud becomes lost knowledge a generation later. Unprincipled exceptions always yield to superior holiness. Hence generational loss of hypocrisy.
From "The Goal Is Soft Genocide. Unless Stopped, the Outcome Will Be Hard Genocide." by The Dreaded Jim:
And from the comments of "Putin Successfully Stabilizing Syria" by the same:
See also "Reason as Memetic Immune Disorder" by Phil Goetz.
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