flitter
1yr ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/eabgr3/even_space_marines_need_artillery_support_why_i/
Warhammer 40k, StarWars, Fascism, Equality. Even Spacemarines need artillery support.
flitter
1yr ago
Firefox mobile can install adblock addons & play videos in the background.
Can't do the skipping-sponsored-content afaik
flitter
1yr ago
Interesting, I find the consistent tree structure more intuitive than the sibling only branching screenshot. Props to customization
flitter
1yr ago
Why does selecting text near the top of the screen scroll up in this UI?
Find a big post like https://www.themotte.org/post/216/meta-something-shiny-and-two-things, scroll down a bit, and then try to select a sentence within an inch of the screen-top.
flitter
1yr ago
Watts used to hold those positions more strongly. I think he has updated his opinions more recently in Nov 2022. His blog has some posts about consciousness and survival
https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10307
What they’ve got, as it turns out, is a nifty little proof-of-principle in support of the Free-Energy-Minimization model I was chewing over last April. Back then it was Mark Solms, forcing me to rethink my assertion that consciousness could be decoupled from the survival instinct. The essence of Solms’ argument is that feelings are a metric of need, you don’t have needs unless you have an agenda (i.e., survival), and you can’t feel feelings without being subjectively aware of them (i.e., conscious). I wasn’t fully convinced, but I was shaken free of certain suppositions I’d encrusted around myself over a couple of decades. If Solms was right, I realized, consciousness wasn’t independent of survival drives; it was a manifestation of them.
https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10225
Only now—now, as it turns out, maybe sentience implies survival after all. Maybe I’ve had my head up my ass all these years.
I’m not sure I buy it. Then again, I’m not writing it off, either.
flitter
1yr ago
minimizing how many instructions you need to add to the genome in order to make something happen
This is the mechanism for why the body isn't fully optimized: it has to be backwards compatible and build iteratively off of previous DNA. That tech debt is exactly what an artificial engineered brain/body could re-design.
flitter
1yr ago
That makes sense, direct editing is going to cause a lot of indirect problems. Similar to immune system or dietary supplements.
flitter
1yr ago
Might be falling into a history average familiarity trap. I don't people are going to be naming even second-rate pharaohs
flitter
11mo ago
In the way that a sculptor discovers the statue, the Hock will break you until only Strength remains
flitter
11mo ago
The flipped version is likely prostitution. Men who are down on their luck can't sell themselves. Woman who are down on their luck can (to some extant). This is an extra option for women, but it's generally not an appealing one, so isn't seen as an advantage for women.
flitter
11mo ago
It's a very strong argument against naive whiggish presentism. You've given good argument that some moral principles merely followed in the wake of technological abundance, and weren't "self evidently" adapted until the economics changed. Perhaps the average morality as practiced is accidental and self congratulatory.
Something hinted in this post is that an individual "weak" morality is a strong meme, and can convert others faster than they destroy the carriers. The "go kill people and take their shit" meme builds a large empire through conquer. When material conditions improve it seems like "tithe to the poor and hungry" gains a footing and starts taking over though. Either through Fashionably irrationality or through moral discovery who knows. A prime case study of this is the spread of Christianity through Rome. Or the final boss Fukuyama.
The core question is what happens to morality over time when material conditions don't improve. Do the social structures remain static? Or do they develop on the same converging fixed points but more slowly. You mention George Washington was a strong supporter of slavery during a time it was seems as economically necessary, and yet during that time there were also abolitionists, who opposed it purely for moral reasons. This seems contrary to the simple thesis you've presented,
For me, I think the nature of morality is too early to call, and depends on deeper studying patterns of history and some questions about how consciousness exists and such.
flitter
11mo ago
This makes sense to me, even if I don't fully agree. There's some truth to how these "hawks" and "doves" will have a overpopulation life-cycle.
On the other hand I suspect there's an underlying structure to these positions (motte) that would suggest that there are stable "optimal" environment behaviors (bailey) that suggests an underlying weak-ordering to how moral a system is (double bailey)
flitter
11mo ago
Agreed, but I think OP would also agree with you. Genes are the primary reproductive unit right now. The secondary reproductive unit right now is the ideas on top of genes. Genes are currently the smallest reproductive unit, the recursive loop of evolution. Memes form on top of them and are influenced by them (see Idiocracy for fictional evidence), but in the future with bio-electronics or large matrices the ideas could create a new primary reproductive unit whose behavior would begin influencing the ideas instead of genes.
flitter
11mo ago
there are still social rules around how you should treat others
Yeah I think this is an example of early forms of local "dove" behavior out-competing the hawk memes for how to treat those around you.
So civilization is the process of expanding the moral circle (I've heard that one before) through competition: brothers outcompete loners. Families outcompete brothers. Tribes outcompete families. etc etc etc.
I'm reminded of the fremen mirage blogpost, which argues that throughout history the expanded (decadent) civs have outcompeted the more spartan "fremen" go-kill-and-take-their-stuff gangs. https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/
flitter
10mo ago
The discussion of sexual behavior has generated some rich concepts to discuss how human desire works. Here I want to discuss three terms that have interesting meaning.
(1) virgin
A simple denotation: hasn't had sex. The connotations are varied, and change with context. It could mean:
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Something is pure and innocence, untouched by corruption (virgin landscape).
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The first time (the virgin voyage of a boat)
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Someone hasn't had a life-changing experience (skydiving virginity)
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That something is safe (virgin drinks without alcohol).
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Insulting someone unable to earn their desire (virgin vs chad)
(2) pornography
Pornography is famously difficult to define outside of "I know it when I see it". Coming from the greek pornographos (writing about prostitutes), it most commonly refers to sexual images and videos that stimulate erotic desire in the viewer.
When used as a metaphor, the scope of "porn" expands to something like the passive observation of the desired object without without the work to actually access it. To fully enjoy it, the viewer must suspend disbelief, and imagine they are a part of the porn in order to pretend the simulation satisfies one's desire for the real thing. However someone who has only viewed porn is often still considered a virgin (but not innocent!), because they haven't actually experienced the desire fulfilled yet.
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The SFW porn network (earthporn for nature, quoteporn for inspiro) is pornographic.
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Most of reddit has a pornographic nature to it. (eg: relationship drama)
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Streamers and podcasts are friendship porn.
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Cooking shows are food porn and online cooking videos are pornified
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Instragram is status porn (and sometimes regular porn).
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Sports competitions are both porn of the game being played, and porn of victory feelings.
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Careless blogposts can end up as insight porn consumed for pleasure.
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Cards-against-humanity game is transgressive joke porn
(3) cucked
A cuckooo bird will lay it's egg in the nest of another bird, tricking them into raising the cuckoo's hatching. This naturally evolves to refer to situations where a parent (usually the dad for obvious reasons) is raising kids he thinks are his, but are in fact from another man. Which then simplifies to the actual act of watching someone else have sex with someone you want. Nowadays known as a cuckhold fetish.
The concept of cucking has become so broad and complicated that a psychiatrist could write a whole book about it. A sample story might have a husband watching someone else fuck his wife. Which raises the question at the core of the cuck fetish: why doesn't she fuck the husband? A full understanding of cuckholding requires explaining all three motivations. The cuckhold is usually motivated by (suppressed?) feelings of insecurity. He his not capable or worthy of having sex with her. The bull is motivated by either lust or rubbing superiority of dominance hierarchy in the cuckolds face. The cuck-er similarly may be lustful, or could also be sadistically belittling the cuckold.
Racial dynamics add to this swirl. The common case is a white man watching a white woman fuck a black man (with a large penis). This fantasy props up so much there are entire porn sites based on this concept, and plenty of alt-right fanfiction about it. Racial insecurity. There's a secondary market for asian men watching an asian woman fuck a white man (with a large penis), which is related to WhiteMale-AsianFemale couples, and asian masculinity in general.
Some use of "cuck" in practice simply mean coward. Someone with "cucked beliefs". Or a cuck-servitave (cringe conservative). This dilutes the richer meaning of cuckholding. A more proper usage is the bike-cuck meme, in which a man copes with the loss of a bike by imagining someone else enjoys riding it more than him. Perhaps he'd like to watch too. An additional meme is the copypasta that raising a daughter is cucked because the dad is spending his time and effort helper her grow as a person for another man to enjoy. Which is an interesting broken perspective.
....
All porn is cuckhold porn. The object of desire (the sex) is happening on a screen and is inaccessible. The viewer must either accept the cuckholding, or delude themselves into thinking they are a playing a part. This process spirals into insecurity, first from feeling inferior to the object of desire, which leads to a cuckhold fetish to the porn itself, a feeling that one doesn't deserve to fuck reality and should be constrained to the porn. Giving up and accepting that fucking reality is too much wok.
flitter
10mo ago
Reading fiction is a metaphorical cuckholding when the reader is watching the characters experience the narrative and discovery that they themselves want to experience.
This is not a bad thing about fiction, and it is not-not a bad thing. I think there's an important pattern to be noticed around 'cucking' and how we experience desire. I don't want to be making the worst argument in the world by tying this pattern to the negative connotations of 'cucking'.
If you read Harry Potter and enjoy it, there may be many reasons why you enjoy it. Learning character archetypes, learning more about oneself through reading, trying to predict what happens next, etc. But if you told me that you expressly enjoyed reading Harry Potter because you would love to go on a wizarding adventure and therefore enjoyed reading about someone else who could... well. Especially if you told me you'd rather read Harry Potter than go on your own adventure somehow.
Harry Potter's adventures are more interesting than my adventures in the day, because they're more exciting and I don't have to do any work to make them happen.
flitter
10mo ago
Watching porn of oneself. Hm not sure how to categorize that. Perhaps metaphorically masturbatory? Because one is finding themselves hot? I dunno
flitter
10mo ago
Haha perhaps I am psychotic due to reading Baudrillard too young and getting to read such things.
I agree some people get way too deep into cuck stuff, especially in right-wing internet circles. However I think the root cause is from unaddressed insecurity complexes, which present themselves as feeling unworthy of their desires and finding excuses including imagining superior competition in great detail.
flitter
10mo ago
I like the theorizing about aspects of normal male heterosexuality wanting to degrade and female heterosexuality wanting to oblige. Opportunity to study those mechanics of how sexual desire is actually related to by the person.
Those categories seem like a good start, with more underlying variation and complexity that could be analyzed more. Maybe Queer theorists have also looked at this?
flitter
10mo ago
Those miserable genres of media are known as Misery Porn. The reader wants to experience something about those cases (the desirability of the victim?) and can experience those thrills second hand, through the victim getting fucked by the world, much like a cuck watching someone experience what he is too insecure to experience himself. Hmm it's a stretch.
The boundary between art and porn is going to be complicated because neither concept is well defined. My view is that a few things are true:
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there is porn (explicit video) that has artistic aesthetic value alongside the titillation. (eg through camerawork)
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there is an art of making porn: where various representations of titillation are practiced.
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there is a porn-like nature to all art: where it is trying to invoke a feeling in you without involving you in reality.
A major goal of this forum is to avoid the kind of incendiary language used here. Speak plainly. Don't attempt to build consensus about whether Vaush sucks, give an argument instead.
What led you to predict that "bread tube" would be anti-AI? Do you find their position hypocritical? Anti-progress?
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