fmaa
1yr ago
We get sick much less often and die much later than ever. Hate is hard to measure but death by violence is also rarer than ever. Coveting and lusting are possibly as popular as ever but much less clearly bad. Theft and rape are both, again, rarer than ever. As in that previous post, you're just going on about how the lack of perfect solutions means everything is exactly the same as centuries ago.
I didn't make any claims about how strong the evidence is in any of the cases, just that it's there and newer than a fucking millennium. It also goes the other way, every religious person expressing a personal experience of miracle is also new evidence in favor of there being a god. I think the overall evidence is absurdly in favor of there not being one, but it's even more absurd to claim this question has stayed unchanged in centuries. And by simple statistics, for e.g. novel false religions to not be evidence against christianity, a lack of such would also have to not be evidence for it. Would you honestly not take "novel false religions stopped popping up after the spread of christianity" as evidence for it?
For the mind, we can insert electrodes into to the brain to make the housed consciousness go through various experiences. We can affect it much more strongly in predictable ways with various chemicals, for which we know which specific receptors they bind to. We have numerous studies of various forms of brain damage to see how they affect the conscious experience. None of these are things that would have made any sense a 1000 years ago. And yet you claim they don't impact our understanding of consciousness any because Disney hasn't invented mind control rays, again the insane binary worldview.
And again, from simple statistics, the only way these things aren't evidence against a soul is if their negation also wouldn't be evidence for a soul. If drugs or brain damage could affect your motor control but not your conscious experience, for example, you'd also have to not count that as evidence for a soul separate from the body.
Free will is either perfectly compatible - just because my brain is deterministic doesn't mean it doesn't go through a choice-making algorithm, which is what I'm experiencing - or it is currently unfalsifiable, requiring probably impossible cloning technology or time travel.
Lastly and most importantly, I don't want to hold you to previous generations of christians or care much for the many stupid views other materialists, past or present, hold. I fact quite the opposite, I want you to acknowledge that you are vastly different from the christians of a thousand years ago, and your belief system and worldview are different from theirs, because it has been informed by an entire millennium of new evidence. Materialism can be both a breakthrough and a ideology like many others, they're not really exclusive. But unlike yours it doesn't particularly view deforming its ideology as a bad thing.
fmaa
1yr ago
I feel like putting all this together is mixing very different categories of errors.
There are errors more common with native speakers that stem from learning the language phonetically and unconsciously, without thinking about the logic or formal meaning of what you're saying, such as "should of", then/than mixups or "irregardless".
There are errors more common with ESL people that stem from English spelling and grammar being arbitrary nonsense. It is impossible to derive irregular verb forms of which there are many, and impossible to derive the spelling of a word from hearing it.
As a mix of both, many ESL people struggle with using the correct article because their language doesn't have an analogous concept of definite vs indefinite nouns.
And there are "errors" which are prescriptivist nonsense. By whose measure is "noone" not an acceptable compound but "someone" is? Why does the moronic norm that the comma and period at the end my second paragraph should be inside the quotation marks persist?
fmaa
1yr ago
I guess it'd be more accurate to say that I'm not assuming it's incorrect, I'm conjecturing it. So prepend every bit of communication ever (for Boltzmann brains also include thoughts as communication between different mindstates across time) with "Conditional on solipsism being false,". This doesn't actually say anything about the accuracy of solipsism.
Though, for models of solipsism weaker than Boltzmann brains it's not in the least clear that Occam's Razor even prefers them. Conditional on thoughts being real and coherent across time, there actually being an inductive external reality is the simplest explanation for me experiencing one, as the vast majority of possible mindstates would not feature such experience.
fmaa
1yr ago
I'm aware of the difference. Part of my point was that naming a specific artstyle "modern" and then sneering when people use that word to mean contemporary is just being a condescending asshole and bad at communicating.
The other, bigger part was that no, you don't need to know the jargon to complain about things being forced on you. I'm not going to find lists of NYC buildings, but I think like 90% of that Pritzker prize list is ugly and about half of it is concrete boxes. It really doesn't matter to anyone living in/near them if these particular ugly concrete boxes don't count as brutalist according to architects.
fmaa
1yr ago
Many philosophers have identified religion has giving rise to science in the first place. Because at the most basic, fundamental level, believe in natural science assumes a priori that that reality is ordered and knowable, a proposition one must take on faith.
As with all sorts of similar solipsistic arguments, my response is this: either both me and you are actual minds existing in an external reality where induction works, or the very concept of communication is nonsense. So you can presume that every piece of communication ever starts with that assumption and go from there.
fmaa
2yr ago
He literally states his goal in the article:
I care because there’s a lazy argument for censorship which goes: don’t worry, we’re not going to censor honest disagreement. We just want to do you a favor by getting rid of misinformation, liars saying completely false things. Once everybody has been given the true facts - which we can do in a totally objective, unbiased way - then we can freely debate how to interpret those facts.
His isn't talking to you and his point isn't to trust media. He's talking to people who want to ban 'disinformation' and his point is that the way media lies already precludes any simple bright lines for that.
It is quite questionable whether any of this target audience reads Scott, though.
fmaa
2yr ago
I'm not sure a white nationalist and a classical liberal would be indistinguishable on 6.
fmaa
2yr ago
I think it's quite inevitable that when taken seriously games with more than 2 sides end up being more about politics than what the game is explicitly about (unless it is explicitly about politics). Even without throwing the game, any action or inaction can affect the balance between the top players.
The options are finding a gaming group that won't make casual games about politics, one that enjoys the politics, or playing games with 2 sides.
Pretty much the only games I can think of that people play seriously (read: professionally) with more than 2 sides are gambling games like poker and mahjong. And I'm fairly sure they are rife with collusion scandals.
fmaa
4d ago
Otoh it turned out that the optimal level of smallpox was in fact 0. Don't confuse "eliminating this bad thing isn't worth infinite resources" with "eliminating this bad thing requires infinite resources".
fmaa
6d ago
See the first part of https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/21/current-affairs-some-puzzles-for-libertarians-treated-as-writing-prompts-for-short-stories/
I don't even necessarily disagree that this might be a good use of government, but this is essentially not an argument for democracy, but an argument for imperialism. Backwards communities need better morals enforced on them by guys with guns from more enlightened ones.
fmaa
1mo ago
The vile part is the guilt transference. Christianity doesn't say that everyone's guilty but god forgives them anyway (not that I don't think original sin is a pretty vile concept as well), christianity says that god can forgive us because he transferred our just punishment by torturing Jesus to death (though he got better). That Jesus dying for other peoples sins is a meaningful moral concept.
If the mother of a criminal to be executed says "No, take me instead!", the official who says "Ok, sure" and executes the mother is an injust tyrant, regardless of how much genuine repentance the criminal feels afterwards.
fmaa
7mo ago
Gifting keys to sympathetic people is free, you can just generate keys for your own game. But those don't count towards the review score. Review manipulation requires buying the game from dummy steam accounts with actual money and probably obfuscated payment methods. Which is not to say it doesn't happen, but there is a pretty clear line between marketing and probably steam tos violating review purchasing.
fmaa
7mo ago
No, you cannot. You cannot even come up with the coolest game you've ever played. At best you can do an elevator pitch for the latter, and noone will give a shit because being an ideas guy is indeed not an exclusive skill.
Actual game design starts at the hundreds of pages of plans and spreadsheets and design documents required to turn those ideas into something concrete. The detail level of which keeps growing the more people with less direct personal communication you need to convey those ideas to.
Tons of great games have been made without artists. Many, many more only spend any time and effort on artists long after the designers are satisfied their prototypes are worth the expense. Tons of great games have been made without programmers. The entire fields of designer board games and tabletop rpgs are like 30-60 years old despite requiring no technology not available centuries ago, only advances in game design.
fmaa
1yr ago
It is very convenient to compare middle class non-white people of unspecified race and culture to specifically muslims and Roma of unspecified class. Now try comparing middle class european acceptance of middle class indians and east asians to american acceptance of low class blacks from their own country.
fmaa
1yr ago
First, this use is entirely controlled by Gucci and is therefore served by a regular database and regular accounts on their servers, no blockchain required.
Second, I think you understate how big a problem it is that your nfts are actually completely divorced from the bags. What this use case is actually looking for are PUF (using manufacturing variance for unclonability) RFID tags in the bags, compared against a centralized Gucci database. Looking it up, they're apparently already doing RFID tags, though it's unclear what anti-cloning technology is in them.
fmaa
1yr ago
It's debatable whether quantum physics is actually contradictory with determinism, but aside from that, I don't see why randomness is any worse than determinism. Either way our actions are ultimately governed by external forces.
I think it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the materialist position to call these external forces. Your mind is the processes in your brain, these processes not violating the laws of physics doesn't make them external.
fmaa
1yr ago
Does it not give you any pause that you've now likened these real and existing Canadian doctors to five fictional characters and zero real people? In fact contrasting this fictional archetype with two actual people.
fmaa
1yr ago
Basic information theory would suffice, unless you want me to demonstrate the concepts of meaning or the validity of induction. In which case you've retreated from your original point to the standard 'treating solipsism as a gotcha against materialists' position. This has come up so often on this board, I should come up with a catchy enough formulation to make it my flair: either any communication happens between real minds existing in an inductive external reality (including thoughts as communication across time) or the concept of communication is nonsense. So prepend any communication ever with "Conditional on solipsism being false,".
fmaa
1yr ago
I'd say that the usual theodicy formulation is extremely overstated, and in fact the observed universe is incompatible with a god that's just kinda potent, benevolent and scient. It is very easy to imagine limited supernatural powers falling well short of omni-anything which could vastly improve the world.
Unsurprisingly, just about the only sensible theodicy I've seen is Scott's Answer to Job, and that's a creative writing exercise, not an attempt to explain the world. Though he does now have a link to actual apologetics using this line of reasoning.
It doesn't actually argue this since it doesn't specify any of these things, except Da Vinci's understanding of figure and form. Which I think is matched by millions of art students worldwide who've practiced figure drawing. The internet is flooded with artists of absolutely astounding technical skill by historical standards and no one cares.
He doesn't give any criteria to judge the various categories of writers by. Or even give a category for Turing and Von Nuemann. As computer scientists, they knew far less than any halfway competent CS student these days. And these students do not learn from their original writings because other people have since found better ways to formulate their results. As pioneers in a nascent field of science, who or what field are you comparing them to and finding the modern analogues wanting?
fmaa
1yr ago
I think meritocracy is a bad name for the concept, as it implies a particular system of organization. When really it's a metric you can apply to any system. And all systems are very much not the same in how meritocratic they are.
To structure society such that intelligence is privileged over every other human trait is to create a very dumb underclass, and to reduce the average intelligence of the working class as many of the smart kids are siphoned off to the middle classes. It also naturally creates a social division between those who meet the arbitrary and changing benchmarks for "education", and those who do not.
And this incongruous with the rest of your post, essentially "meritocracy isn't real, and it's bad that it's real". But yes, depriving lower classes of highly capable representatives is an inevitable consequence of meritocratic systems. I think that's a vastly preferable outcome to forcing these capable people into roles below their potential.
fmaa
2yr ago
Why a non-sequitur? Earlier parts of section IV show a higher steady state for asians than for whites, then they get dropped from the comparison. If they were included in this graph, it would either show that their advantage is also mostly male and asian women match white women, in which case maybe this graph says a lot more about gender than about race. Or the asian over white advantage is maintained for both genders, which would make for a much stronger anti-HBD argument. Because one of the more appealing HBD talking points imo is that by Occam's razor the black/white gap and the white/asian gap have the same basis.
fmaa
2yr ago
The last argument is one for corporal punishment over prisons, not for mob justice.
And the big issue with mob justice isn't that thieves get beaten up, it's that sometimes the person getting beat up didn't actually do anything except be an outsider and look funny. Or more generally, that the less formal the mechanisms of justice, the more they become about social standing. India does keep popping up in international news about various gangrapes and coverups thereof because the rapists are friendly with/members of the police, which is enabled by the same mechanisms that enable your beatings.
A list of steps I disagree with (edit: fixed list formatting):
1. There's probably millions of words on Less Wrong about dealing with Pascal's wager, because precisely formulating a consistent decision theory that deals with it is is extremely difficult. At yet every human manages to operate under one - as AhhhTheFrench's examples show, everyone is already rejecting infinitely many such wagers at every point in their lives. The big problem for your argument is that most of these difficulties don't really require infinities, basically every stupid gotcha works about the same with just extremely big rewards for extremely low probabilities. You're also not giving him money if he promises he's invented life extension technology that will allow you and your family billions of years of happy (and fully-christian-compliant for all you afterlife worries) life. One rejects that offer by the same internal mechanism as the infinite version. But your steps 2.-4. rely precisely on the infinite.
5. Technically true in that there's no reason to think any way is likely, but this doesn't lead into the following steps.
6. This isn't even an argument, just a baseless assertion. If I had to pick one I'd say hallucinogens have stronger standing than religion here, but I don't actually have to pick.
7.1. You smuggled in some christian assumptions in the formulation in this statement - many religions involve a multitude of supernatural forces with differing agendas and power levels. Large religions could be such because they are led by evil forces or whatever.
7.2. Even assuming monotheism, that may be how a reasonable god would operate, but so much evidence from our world shows that, were there a god, it would be very far from a reasonable one.
8. Straightforwardly false. Especially when you nicely worded it to include nirvana.
9. If you're going for appeasing multiple religions at once, there's an infinity to choose from, so why stop at judaism and christianity?
10. As others have already mentioned, this one is very weak if you haven't already bought into a christian worldview.
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