fmaa
1yr 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.
fmaa
1yr ago
The problem, insofar as there is one, is that Elo is a metric, not a target. And like all metrics measuring things people want, it immediately gets treated like a target. Which doesn't really make it lose its value as a metric because it's very hard to fake, but it does make people miserable.
Past the first handful of games in a Trueskill style system (where your rating has both an expected value and a variance, and when the system has little knowledge of your skill the variance is huge), the yo-yo effect isn't very real. If the matchmaker is actually matching people close in ranking (a big issue in many games is prioritizing queue times over match quality), it should take extremely improbable streaks to get matched significantly outside your skill range. Realistically, the gap between you at your peak and you on an off day is much bigger than random Elo fluctuations. It's just that when you're treating ranking as a target, not a metric, any random upswings feel like long deserved gains and random downswings feel like the matchmaker is out to get you.
I'd like to play against people whom I feel challenge me when I'm playing at my general 'best' without exerting myself to try to keep pace.
Your level of exertion can't help but be factored into you ranking. If you do ever exert yourself to keep pace, you'll be ranked higher than your general 'best' without exertion. So you're explicitly asking to be matched against people worse than you.
fmaa
7mo ago
We still have ignorance, poverty, crime and war three centuries later, and in about the same amounts.
It's one thing to make arguments that the enlightenment doesn't deserve any credit for the industrial revolution, but this is straightforwardly false. We have vastly less of all of those things per capita.
fmaa
11mo ago
Not only is is such a calculation possible, it is unavoidable. Most moral goods have a material cost, and basically no human picks the maximally moral side of that tradeoff. Though it is the relative, not absolute cost that matters for people, which is why the world is getting so much better. The marginal cost of saving a human life anywhere on Earth is about 5k these days, which is orders of magnitude higher than when people starting tracking things like this, as modern abundance has allowed people to actually work at saving lives on a massive scale, picking all the low-hanging fruit.
And in general your framing of the examples is exactly backwards. Increased wealth is what allows for the luxury of moral good. For example, evidently the cost of abolishing slavery (including serfdom) is too big for a pre-industrial society.
fmaa
1yr ago
The strongest evidence is probably the way in which various forms of brain damage change aspects of personality, in a manner that would be very odd under a soul-radio model of the brain.
Evidence that it happens in the brain doesn't really make it much less mysterious though.
fmaa
1yr ago
It is a massive benefit of the abundance of industrial society that it can support and reward obsessive outliers in their pursuit of human achievement.
fmaa
5mo ago
It mostly strikes me as incoherent, no number of d20s can implement computation and self_made_human's output is easily distinguishable from random strings.
fmaa
5mo ago
The first part is a subjective view. I could say that most parents expecting to see all their children to reach adulthood is a meaningful change to the human condition that's less than a century old, or that steroids trade health for fitness in a way the two couldn't be meaningfully opposed in Socrates' time, but we'll likely never agree on what counts as meaningful. I think merely massively improving the human condition counts for a lot. You do also mix this with measurable aspects, as in the linked post, where you are just factually wrong.
I could argue that coveting built most of our modern prosperity and lust is why most of us are even around, by looking at the evolutionary basis for these feelings. That they have negative effects as well doesn't say what the total sign is.
I continue to not care about what outlandish predictions past materialists made which failed to materialize. It is not an ideology that requires unity of thought among its adherents, I can evaluate individual predictions under my own materialist framework. No form of materialism I respect has promised mind control rays. It's still unclear to me what your problem with the quoted original passage is. The importance is obviously subjective, but evolution by natural selection very much explains the cause of human impulses in a way unavailable before.
I agree that framing Bayesian priors in exact percentages is generally disingenuous, but that doesn't make the entire approach so. Enough people I know and respect claiming miracles would make me significantly question my understanding of the world. A non-negligible part of the internet ratsphere turning catholic mildly made me do so, my understanding of internet rationalists a lot more than my understanding of religion though.
I have no idea how decapitation is supposed to show that the brain is the seat of consciousness over the heart, for example. Trepanation being used for mental illnesses is a much better example. But I do think there's a significant difference between using alcohol as a black box and knowing it's one of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GABAA_receptor_positive_allosteric_modulator, knowing the chemical actions by which it inhibits neuron activity and knowing that your altered conscious state is caused by inhibited neuron activity. Yes, going from this to explaining how being drunk makes you feel is a very long way, but I think it's a step in the right direction and I still don't care if some people claimed they could make the entire journey in a couple of decades or whatever.
Plenty of people on this board often complain about the deleterious effect of the superstimulus that is modern entertainment, so presumably they would vehemently disagree with your assessment. I think modern disney is mostly a massive tangle of principal-agent problems.
For the soul, I mean a metaphysical answer to the hard problem. I think most religious peoples conception of a soul fits this description. So zero drugs affecting your conscious experience would be evidence for a soul. As is, many drugs do affect it, so it does in fact have physical properties and interactions.
Yes, compatibilism is equally currently unfalsifiable as any test would have to prove one version of free will over the other. I'm just saying it's a perfectly coherent model of why I experience free will, so this experience in no way contradicts materialism.
fmaa
6mo 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
6mo ago
I can just paste my reply to the previous post here I saw that used solipsism to defend religion: 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.
To actually require that clarification in front of every single statement made by everyone is meaningless pedantry in the same category as requiring every subjective statement to start with "in my opinion".
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
9mo 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
1yr ago
If messing around with the radio makes it output an entirely different program, one would suspect that it was actually generating, not receiving a signal. (Or changed which signal it receives. Brain damage tunes your body to a different soul/consciousness is an option.)
As far the popular view of consciousness as mostly providing a narrative/excuses for subconscious processes (of which Jaynes' feels like a variation, where the narrative historically wasn't conceptualized as "I" and didn't have to have a single narrator), I feel like that would only more strongly suggest that it is inherently embodied.
fmaa
1yr ago
I get that. I'm saying that the analogy doesn't work because their beliefs and theology are directly linked, unlike the fire and the circus in the analogy. Not relating to the specific theological trappings isn't the fundamental cause of not being taken seriously by nonbelievers. They might be if the analogy is to converting non-catholic christians (back) to catholicism, though.
fmaa
1yr ago
One thing I find particularly frustrating about discussions on transhumanism is that attempts to find medical or technological solutions to problems -- like aging, dementia, osteoporosis, etc. -- are often lumped in with attempts to reform or reformat the human species into something that it is not, by technological means.
Viewing aging as a problem to be solved is already essentially transhumanist. But then you go on and call a problem "early knee failure", implying there is a proper time and place for knees to fail. The transhumanist view is that there isn't one. The aesthetic preference of whether the ideal knee is one that looks like your Platonic knee but never deteriorates, or part of a cyberpunk monstrosity that allows leaping over buildings is a minor quibble within transhumanism in comparison.
fmaa
1yr ago
While this excerpt has relevance as a list of specific failings, it does have the caveat that repeating remedial training is the smarter option compared to getting shipped to Vietnam.
fmaa
1yr ago
He has succefully marketed EVs as sexy instead of lame
This one is interesting because of how little it actually took. A large part of it was just making a regular ass sedan at a time when other manufacturers were making their EVs conspicuously ugly (so you can show everyone how much you care about the environment).
So little, but apparently impossible for those existing manufacturers.
This part is confusing two entirely separate things:
The last I checked, the distance between the equator and the north pole doesn't have any reasonable relationship to my everyday life, why should I expect units of time to?
One is the need for an independently verifiable definition of your measures, these days generally based on fundamental physical constants. Instead of building your system on a prototypical example and then accumulating measurement errors outward from it. Every system needs this, and in fact your current imperial units are defined as fractions of SI units, piggybacking on the definitions work of metric.
The other is the scale of the default unit, which is completely independent from your method of definition. After deciding to base the meter on the earth's circumference the actual fraction can still be freely chosen. The meter was picked specifically as a length useful in everyday life, it's pretty much the same scale as a yard.
Again with this shit. Because humanity hasn't solved all its problems and answered all questions, it has actually stagnated for centuries. Millennia!
Natural selection is very much evidence against god that didn't exist a 1000 years ago. People used the inexplicable miracle of life as evidence for god right up until it was explicable. Of course an implication directly leads to its contrapositive, not the negation, but I'd say the negation is usually implied in a Bayesian sense. Of course, Bayes himself is a lot more recent than a 1000 years.
Every aspect of the mind that gets explained and controlled by physics and chemistry is evidence against the existence of a soul. As people learn to measure and control your every impulse and emotion by manipulating your brain, you'll continue to shift the goalposts as long as they haven't solved the hard problem. (Which religion doesn't either of course. One the most beautiful aspects of materialism is that "I don't know" is an acceptable answer where religion pretends to knowledge it doesn't have or goes for "it is unknowable", a statement with an impossible burden of proof that has been shown wrong on innumerable topics time over time.)
Edit: and mormonism and scientology among others are new evidence against Jesus being the son of god. Any new cult with nonsense supernatural claims taken just as seriously as the old ones is evidence against the old ones being true by giving more data on the patters of how such beliefs form.
fmaa
6mo 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.
fmaa
9mo ago
That, and because there's a bank of railguns running along the underside of the fuselage, and the rear area is taken up by life support and capacitors. Also, because I thought it looked cool! Thinking about it, though, there's no reason not to go glassless and just bury the pilot down in the guts of the craft. They'd be safer there as well...
The "hard(er) sci-fi writer explaining away rule-of-cool art" answer is that this is already the case and the dome at the front is a sensor array.
fmaa
1yr ago
https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths Proportionally less than in any previous century from violence. Or in early childhood, thanks to modern medicine. Or from starvation, thanks to industrial fertilizers. As for happiness, Ted might have had a better point if he went for the invention of agriculture. But pre-industrial agricultural society meant that the vast majority of humanity were subsistence farmers subject to frequent violence.
fmaa
1yr ago
Well, that's mostly the issue of asymmetric games pretending to be symmetric. In better designed games, the asymmetry is explicit and both the advantages and limitations of the AI are built around instead of the game pretending they don't exist.
And the second problem isn't really fundamentally caused by the asymmetry, it's caused by bad victory conditions. Plenty of strategy games become gigantic slogs by endgame when played in multiplayer as well. Which is why nearly all multiplayer matches in Starcraft or Civ end in forfeits.
I think the one IP based aspect of the RTS template that easily could have converged towards very different designs is the focus on in-map resource extraction and economy. You can't make a Dune game without harvesters, but you can easily make a strategy game without actively managed economy units and harassing thereof. And many successful RTS's from this century have abandoned this aspect.
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